| Edification value |  |
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| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 113 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned |  In March of 2026, the Jewish Children’s Museum launched an escape room themed on the Book of Exodus. Designed for older kids and adults, operating in teams, the escape room requires reservations and a separate admission. I got to peek inside during my tour, and I’m obsessed with the idea of solving puzzles to get out of Egypt. I hear the exit even has a dramatic water feature that simulates parting the Red Sea! |
The Jewish Children’s Museum (JCM), slightly over twenty years old, occupies a tall, purpose-built, contemporary building on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, across Kingston Avenue from the world headquarters of the Chabad Lubavitch movement of Judaism.
The museum as an unfortunately tragic backstory. Ari Halberstam was 16 years old in 1994 when he and some other kids accompanied the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem M. Schneerson, who needed eye surgery in Manhattan. On the way back, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, the van Ari was riding in was attacked in a hate crime, and he was killed.
Ari’s mom, Devorah Halberstam, became a crusader against terrorism and anti-semitism, and a proponent of tolerance. Reasoning that kids aren’t born hating anyone, and that the best way to nurture tolerance is to instill understanding, Ms. Halberstam co-founded the Jewish Children’s Museum, which is dedicated to Ari’s memory.
I heard this origin story from Sarah Leah Bronstein, Group Programs Director at the JCM, who kindly gave me a tour of the museum recently. I’m grateful to Sarah and Chaya’le Strassberg, JCM’s Marketing Director for the tour, and for talking with me about the museum and its mission.
The very modern building — nothing obviously traditional or historically informed about it — features a giant mural made up of photographs of children (Ari included) and a huge steel dreidel sculpture, both of which help indicate the building’s purpose. Inside, the museum houses two main floors of permanent exhibition space, as well as a theater, two restaurants (one meat, one dairy), temporary exhibition space, and a few surprises (like the aforementioned escape room).
The curators of the museum approach Judaism along two axes: traditions and history, with one floor of exhibit space devoted to each.
Traditions and Culture
We started on the traditions floor. The first thing a visitor sees leaving the elevator is the “World of Good,” which explores Judaism’s view of good acts. Things like visiting the sick, respecting your parents, being kind to animals, giving to charity, not letting things go to waste, all illustrated in more or less interactive ways. I found this a smart way to approach Judaism, since, yes, these are specifically Jewish requirements, but they’re also things that any kid from any background will recognize and understand.
From there, visitors proceed to a kosher grocery store and kitchen. I’ve observed before and I’ll observe here again, kids love playing store, and children’s museums tend to support future retail careers.
Sabbath and Holidays
Past the kosher supermarket, other areas on the traditions floor cover:
- A hallway timeline that quickly and dramatically covers the six days of the creation of the world. Which logically ends at the seventh day and…
- A Shabbat dinner, featuring candles, a giant challah kids can crawl through, and an equally
giant matzoh ball soup (no swimming). I watched an animated, talking bottle of wine in a video embedded in a ginormous wineglass, something I’ve never encountered at another children’s museum. - A gamified explanation of what you can and can’t do on the sabbath, and how that’s changed over time. This installation featured myriad lights and buttons, reminding me of Mission Control, if the mission were staying on the right side of the law.
The Traditions floor culminates in an impressively thorough overview of the Jewish holidays, designed as a village. Naturally it includes holidays like Hannukah and Yom Kippur and Passover that I reckon almost any New Yorker will know. And it also covers ones that I know less well but am fascinated by. Tu B’Shevat, the New Year of trees, features a somewhat creepy and ent-like animated tree, who explains that holiday.
5,786 Years of History on One Floor
The other floor of exhibits focuses on Jewish history, starting with Abraham’s tent in the desert with its four doors. Enter the tent and visitors meet Sarah (Abraham’s wife, not my tour guide), who welcomes them. She says she knows they’ve traveled far, most likely including by elevator. Which made me smile.
From there, the visitor follows a roughly chronological path through Biblical Jewish history. Highlights for me included:
- The aforementioned Exodus escape room,
- A fun light-up map illustrating the 40 years of wandering in the desert, and
- An interactive moment where guests must cooperatively “blow” seven shofar to make the walls of Jericho fall.
A section on the Land of Israel follows, and then “Sages Through the Ages,” a gallery that discusses the canon of Jewish law and the great scholars who have set the tone of interpreting the Talmud and the Mishna over the centuries. Even here I was impressed by how the curators have found ways to take a rather dry, academic topic (for me anyway) and bring it to life through animation and interactivity.
Tackling the Holocaust
The floor concludes with more recent Jewish history, as well as a fun Noah’s Ark play area for very young kids. I wondered how, if at all, a children’s museum would attempt to tackle the Holocaust. You kind of have to, right? But, it’s impossible to tell how much parents or teachers might or might not have told young visitors about that chapter of history, and also difficult to level-set for disparate ages and maturity levels.
Amidst the walk through Jewish history, there’s a grey wall that looks like a ghetto. A small hallway behind that wall features phone receivers, small images, and a few artifacts. The space is less about what happened to six million Jews, and more about how people going through that unimaginable time did their best to keep their traditions alive.
Building a menorah out of scavenged spoons, finding ways to keep Kosher, baking matzoh at a time and place when being caught doing so was a death sentence. The stark space marks a strong visual departure from the colorful design and carnival atmosphere that pervades the rest of the museum. It’s a good indicator of the care and thought that went into JCM’s design.
Activity, Interactivity, and Hyperactivity
We wrapped up my tour of the museum upstairs, with, unexpectedly, a small climbing wall that, as a kid moves horizontally across it, recaps the history lessons from downstairs. And an outdoor terrace offers a 6-hole mini-golf course that covers the major milestones of Jewish life. A hole under a huppah for marriage, that sort of thing. I regret not playing the bar mitzvah hole, so that I could proudly tell everyone I have become a man.
Finally, we stopped into the temporary exhibition this summer. Kosher Wonderland offers an indoor, food-themed play area. Kids can enjoy a veggie ball-pit, a fishmongers where they can sort kosher from non-kosher plush sea creatures, slide down a giant inflatable cake, and much more. Not a single bacon double cheeseburger as far as the eye can see.
The curators and designers of the JCM took care to pack in both activity (to burn off excess energy) and interactivity (to help hold attention spans). Everything has a gamified, interactive element. The lesson on the seven fruits of Israel takes the form of a water gun game, where visitors can compete to get their chosen produce basket to the top first. (Go, pomegranate!)
Keeping up with the kids today
Sarah Leah and I talked about how some of the exhibit designs from twenty years ago are showing their age. Mainly that relates to attention spans. Some of the videos and other interactive elements feel long to young visitors today, where they did not back in 2004. And fashions and tastes have changed enough in the past couple of decades that some of the videos look dated. (Though not as dated as the unintentionally hilarious biopic of young “Teedie” at the Theodore Roosevelt House.) Finally, a number of screens at the museum are just screens, and of course everyone (kids especially) tends to assume that every screen today is a touchscreen. Updating installations, exhibits, and videos to keep up with changing times challenges all museums, regardless of topic or target audience.
Kids being, universally, sticky little monsters, they sometimes treat the exhibits and displays roughly. So not every installation works all the time. But that’s to be expected given the audience. I was more impressed by how much worked, and how cleverly the museum uses different kinds of interactivity. And I deeply prefer good, old-fashioned, mechanical, and tangible displays to exhibits where everything is digital and screen-based.
Who is the Jewish Children’s Museum for?
Sarah Leah and I also discussed the unique challenges posed by the varying audiences that the JCM addresses. Kids as the core audience, of course, and simultaneously the grown-ups who have to interpret and hopefully also feel engaged by the place. But it also has to serve both Jewish visitors and non-Jewish ones (and both kids and grown-ups in each category).. Curators would have an easier time if JCM just spoke to people in the know, but it has to be approachable and engaging to people who don’t know anything about Judaism, while not being too basic for those who grew up immersed in the history, culture, laws, and traditions.
As a New Yorker for over 30 years, I think I can claim a little Jewishness by cultural osmosis. I’m at least superficially familiar with many of the traditions and the Bible stories covered by the museum. But I learned a lot, too. Sukkot, for example, has always been a bit of a mystery to me, to say nothing of tree new year.
Should you visit the Jewish Children’s Museum?
Anyone with kids around 8-12 should consider checking out the JCM. Its exhibits are well thought out, cleverly designed, and a lot more fun than I expected. I think the Jewish Children’s Museum potentially has an opportunity to institute periodic grown-up nights for curious non-Jewish New Yorkers who want to learn more about Judaism but don’t have a good place. Unless that happens, though, please only visit if you have kids with you.
Heads up that the Brooklyn Children’s Museum is also in Crown Heights. I didn’t love it, and the size and scale of both BCM and JCM would make for a very ambitious, dense single day, both for grown-ups and kids.
When I mentioned the Exodus escape room to my circle of work friends, they thought it would make an interesting team-building exercise. None of us is Jewish, but we’re all New Yorkers to varying degrees. And we’ve all seen “The Ten Commandments,” or at least “The Prince of Egypt.” So maybe I’ll get to take a shot at parting the Red Sea.
For Reference:
| Address | 792 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn |
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| Website | jcm.museum |
| Cost | General Admission: $17 for adults; $19 for kids |
| Other Relevant Links |
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