Јеврејски историјски музеј, Архив

The Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade was founded in 1948. The Museum is established within the Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia and is a unique museum in the country. It is thematically specialized and complex in terms of contents. Apart from museum collections, it also has a significant archive.

The activity of the Jewish Historical Museum is versatile and dynamic – it stages exhibitions continually, it has a dynamic publishing activity, and as the only museum of its type, it provides daily assistance and information to scholars, scientists, students and artists, and other interested individuals.

Apart from maintaining contacts with individuals, the Jewish Historical Museum cooperates closely with other similar national and international institutions. There are frequent individual and small group visits to the permanent exhibition of the Museum, and over the recent years there is an increasing number of group visits, especially foreign.

The Museum is actively engaged in research on Jewish life and regularly publishes since 1971 the magazine with studies and research texts which cover the various subjects from the history of Jews on the territory of Yugoslavia.

The building of the Jewish Historical Museum was built in 1928 for the Jewish Sephardic Community of Belgrade. The architect was Samuel Sumbul. During World War II it was taken over by the German Kulturbund. After WW II a part of the building was nationalised. Today, Jewish Historical Museum is situated on the first floor. The second floor is the home of the Jewish Community of Belgrade and the Bros Baruh Choir . On the third floor are the offices of The Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia (the former Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia), the Rabbi's rooms, the library, and the humanitarian pharmacy, instituted in 1992.

The JIM consists of two basic units: museum collections and archives. The archives consists of about 1.500 boxes of materials covering activities of the Jewish Communities and other Jewish institutions which were active for several centuries on this territory. The archives include material related to the life and work of Federation and individual communities of former Yugoslavia from the time before WW II, Jewish prewar press, materials related to antisemitism and the Holocaust, and the wealth of materials related to the Federation and Jewish communities in the period since 1945, as well as chemerotheka (newspaper clippings). Only about 70 boxes are accessible to researchers. In 2017 the Museum's staff has started processing and digitizing the other 1.300 boxes.

During the holocaust, most of the documentation was destroyed, but almost everything that was saved and preserved is now in the Museum archive.

Museum staff is preparing several data bases which will be available on this site. The first will be the data about Jews of Yugoslavia - Victims of Nazism and Holocaust.