Jewish Museum of Florida

The Jewish Museum of Florida occupies two Art Deco synagogues in South Beach that have been beautifully restored and joined as a single museum. The collection tells the story of Jewish life in Florida from 1763 to the present — a history that is unexpectedly rich and runs from Sephardic merchants in the colonial period through the massive immigration from Eastern Europe and the Holocaust to the present-day community.

The South Beach sections of the museum deal with the neighbourhood's decades as a predominantly Jewish retirement community — the years from roughly 1940 to 1980 when it was full of elderly immigrants, Yiddish-speaking shops, and the particular culture of people who had remade themselves in America but kept something of the old world. That community largely dispersed during the South Beach revival; the museum preserves it with affection and scholarly rigour. The buildings themselves are worth seeing for the stained glass and the restoration quality.

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A story
The museum occupies two former synagogues — built in 1929 and 1936 — which were originally constructed to serve the Jewish community that came to dominate South Beach from the 1930s through the 1970s. At the peak of Jewish Miami Beach, the neighbourhood was majority Jewish, with Yiddish signs in the shops, kosher delis on every other block, and the retirees who called it "God's Waiting Room." The synagogues were declared historical landmarks in part because of this community history.