VisitDenmark's website now features a new Jewish Heritage online guide, www.visitdenmark.com/Jewish, revealing points of interest along Denmark's Jewish Heritage Trail in Copenhagen, and beyond. The guide provides historical background, useful facts and suggestions for things to do and places to see, including a Top 5 list, that highlights the Danish-Jewish experience, past and present. The online guide also provides a comprehensive primer on the history of the Jews in Denmark from the first refugees in the 17th century, to the waves of immigrants who passed through the country during the 20th century, and as recently as the Polish Jews who arrived during the 1970s.
The history of the Jews in Denmark begins long before those traumatic days of the 20th century. Denmark's Jewish community, the oldest in Scandinavia, dates back to the 1600s when King Christian IV founded the city of Glückstadt on the River Elbe near Hamburg (now in Germany, but then under Danish rule) as a safe haven for Sephardic Jewish merchants from Spain, Portugal and North Africa.
The online guide also provides inspiration for planning one's own Jewish heritage tour of Denmark, which might include The Danish Jewish Museum, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind; The Judaica collection at The Royal Library; The Museum of Danish Resistance; Copenhagen's Round Tower; Trinitatis Church (where the Torah scrolls from the Great Synagogue were hidden during the Nazi occupation of Denmark); and Copenhagen's Great Synagogue. For more information, visit www.jewish-copenhagen.dk or www.visitdenmark.com/jewish.
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