Jewish Berlin

This full-day tour focuses entirely on the history of Jewish life, culture, and loss in Berlin, guided by a local expert with a particular depth of knowledge in this subject.

Jewish scholars, artists, and business leaders shaped Berlin's cultural and physical landscape for centuries, a story that is fascinating and inspiring on one hand and marked by repression and the horrors of the Holocaust on the other. Your driver meets you at the pier for the roughly 150 mile (242km) drive to Berlin, where your specialist guide joins you in the former Jewish quarter, the old and new center of the city's Jewish life.

Here you see hidden traces of the neighborhood's history before admiring the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, a Moorish Revival landmark whose restored facade anchors one of Berlin's most vibrant streets. From there you walk through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2,711 concrete slabs arranged over undulating ground near the Brandenburg Gate, a deliberately disorienting space built to honor the darkest period of German history.

Your guide then leads you through the former Nazi government quarter to the Topography of Terror, built on the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters, where officials including Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann organized the deportation and murder of millions of European Jews; the outdoor exhibit includes the excavated remains of the original basement prison cells.

The day includes a visit to the Jewish Museum Berlin, opened in 1999 and the largest Jewish museum in Europe. Its building, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and known as "Between the Lines," uses a jagged titanium-zinc facade, angled walls, and unheated concrete voids to tell 2,000 years of German-Jewish history through architecture as much as through the exhibits themselves.

There are kosher and halal lunch options along the route (meal not included), and your guide can recommend the best spot for your group before you return to the pier in Warnemunde or Rostock.