The Jewish heritage runs deep and wide in San Francisco. Jewish entrepreneurs and smart businessmen swept in with the Gold Rush, made their fortunes, had large families, and taught their children to share. What they built or helped to create is all around the city and lives on through major cultural institutions and nonprofit services in every nook and cranny of the city. The highlights of their heritage are in many neighborhoods. You can get to them all by public transportation, but you are better off driving.

Day One

Downtown • Mission

The 1 Contemporary Jewish Museum (736 Mission St., 655-7800) opened in spring 2008 in its new home around the corner from the S.F. Museum of Modern Art. The 63,000-square-foot museum was designed by internationally renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, who also designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin and was master planner for the World Trade Center memorial site.

2 The Holocaust Center of Northern California (121 Steuart St., Suite 10, 777-9060) is a paean amid the pain of Holocaust memories. It sponsors lectures, films and commemorations, programs that make the Holocaust a platform for promoting tolerance. Its university-quality re­search library includes the 500-volume Yizkor book collection, which documents life in the vanquished Jewish communities of Europe and represents two-thirds of all such memorial books in existence, an invaluable source of genealogical information. In the collection are rare books, first editions and out-of-print volumes, from minutiae to the monumental.

The Mission District is a nearby neighborhood that holds some particular interest for the Jewish traveler. One is historic, the other contemporary; both are in flux.

3 The Levi Strauss Factory (250 Valencia St.), built in 1906, replaced two factories lost in the great earthquake and fire. Strauss, who had established a San Francisco branch of his family’s New York cloth company in 1853, began manufacturing denim work pants for Gold Rush miners, unknowingly launching a durable, and enduring, clothing style. His descendants still own the company, though not the building. This red brick and wood structure, which originally accommodated 1,500 sewing machine operators, made denims until 2002. In 2005, the company sold the building to San Francisco Friends School, which opened its K-8 Quaker school there in 2008.

For evening entertainment Sept. through June, 4 Traveling Jewish Theatre (470 Florida; 522-0786) presents original works, created and performed by an artist-led ensemble that uses the Jewish experience to explore universal themes. Founded in 1978, the ensemble has toured more than 60 cities worldwide with works whose topics range from the legends of the Hasidim to the assassination of Trotsky, from Yiddish poetry to the challenge of interfaith marriage.

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