Exploring Jewish History with Maps

The Vilnius Ghetto was a Jewish ghetto established and operated by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius, Lithuania. During the two years of its existence, starvation, disease, street executions, maltreatment and deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps reduced the population of the ghetto from an estimated 40,000 to zero.

Exploring the Vilnius Ghetto: A Digital Monument is a Leaflet powered map that shows over two hundred points of historical significance, pulled from memoirs, archives, original Ghetto documents and artifacts, and oral and historical accounts. Users can explore the map on their own, using filters to find places and events of interest; or they can follow built-in stories.


Caminos de Sefarad uses Google Maps and Google Maps Street View to allow users to visit and tour Spanish cities and discover Spain’s Jewish past. Clicking on a map marker opens an information window with historical information about the selected location and the option to view a 360º panorama using Street View.

The mapped locations can be explored by category, type, geographic zone and date. In total, 523 sites, 910 dates, and 1,683 pictures have been mapped.


The Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal is a Google Map exploring locations that are important in Montreal's Jewish history from its origins in the 1760s until today.

The map allows users to explore Jewish history in Montreal by date and by category. The categories include architecture, culture, events and many more. 


Since 1997 German artist Gunter Demnig has been creating memorials for individual victims of the Holocaust. Demnig's stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) are small, cobblestone-sized memorials for individual victims of Nazism.

Each stolperstein is placed in the sidewalk outside the victim's home. Stolpersteine Online is a Google Map of the memorials that have been erected. The project has created about 35,000 stumbling blocks so far. This is a very small percentage of the total number of victims of the Holocaust, however if you zoom in on any German city on this map you still can't fail to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Nazis Holocaust.