Voyay walking tour

Secrets of Berlin’s Jewish Courtyards

Courtyards, classrooms, memorials, and renewal in historic Jewish Berlin

Berlin, Germany
9 stops
119 min
3.5 km
History

Free in the Voyay app

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This walk explores Jewish Berlin at neighborhood scale. Instead of racing between distant monuments, you will follow the lanes, passages, rear buildings, and courtyards of the Spandauer Vorstadt, where community institutions and everyday businesses once stood only steps apart. The route moves from the vanished Alte Synagoge to Rosenstraße, the lively Hackesche Höfe, Otto Weidt’s intimate workshop, historic schools, domestic memorials, and the old Jewish cemetery. Along the way, architecture and urban gaps reveal stories of education, commerce, rescue, persecution, and neighbors who disappeared from familiar streets. The gilded New Synagogue provides a fitting culmination: grand yet incomplete, commemorative yet active. This tour will especially appeal to curious walkers, architecture lovers, and travelers seeking a thoughtful local history that recognizes loss without overlooking Jewish agency, diversity, and renewal.

Try the first stop

Free sample · Stop 1

Block der Frauen

Powerful stone figures recall women who protested their relatives’ detention.

Ingeborg Hunzinger’s compressed stone figures commemorate the 1943 Rosenstraße protest. Mostly non-Jewish women gathered near a detention center where Jewish husbands and relatives were being held. Walk around both sculptural groups: their weight, narrow setting, and intertwined bodies convey family solidarity under extraordinary pressure without simplifying a complex historical outcome.

The route

9 stops, in order.

Stop 1 · Free sample
Block der Frauen
Powerful stone figures recall women who protested their relatives’ detention.
2
Stop 2
Otto Weidt Workshop
An intimate workshop museum tells a remarkable story of rescue and courage.
Stop 3
Hackesche Höfe
Eight linked courtyards reveal the neighborhood’s layered commercial and social life.
Stop 4
Jewish Cemetery
Berlin’s oldest Jewish cemetery evokes Enlightenment, desecration, and enduring remembrance.
Stop 5
Former Jewish Girls’ School
Modernist architecture preserves a pioneering chapter in Jewish girls’ education.
Stop 6
Der Verlassene Raum
An abandoned bronze table evokes neighbors suddenly taken from ordinary homes.
Stop 7
Das Fehlende Haus
A bombed-out gap becomes a haunting directory of former neighbors.
Stop 8
New Synagogue
A gilded dome crowns this story of confidence, destruction, and renewal.
9
Stop 9
Heckmann-Höfe
Narrow passages reveal the working courtyards beside Berlin’s New Synagogue.