Cologne City Museum
A museum with a Jewish history

Zeughausstraße 1, 50667 Köln

The Zeughaus in Cologne was built around 1600 as the city’s armoury. From 1958 to 2021 it housed the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum (Cologne City Museum). In 1963, Cologne’s Head of Cultural Affairs decided to stage what for the time was a rather unusual exhibition, the Monumenta Judaica. With over 2,000 artefacts, it was the first major exhibition on Jewish religion and art in the Rhineland since the Shoah. The City Museum still has a remarkable collection of Judaica, compiled in the 1920s for the planned Rheinisches Museum (Rhineland Museum), one of the predecessors of the Cologne City Museum. Since early 2024, the City Museum’s new permanent exhibition has been located in what used to be a fashion store called Modehaus Sauer. This is a temporary measure due to water damage at the Zeughaus, whose future use still remains uncertain.