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Earlier this year London's Jewish Museum relocated, revamped and decanted itself into several new purpose developed spaces.  Kate Smith visited to report back for Untold London.

The long first room of the reopened Jewish museum conveys the UK 's Jewish history with symbolic panache.  At one end, a collection of films of modern Jewish Londoners chatting, covering just about everything from food, to nail varnish, to Palestine, to journalism.  Projected on angled, walk through banners, capturing backgrounds, not just the speakers, it shows a group of people comfortable and engaged in a complex world.

At the other end, mute and old, sits a sandstone mikveh, or ritual bath dating back to the early middle ages. Part of a private house in the City of London, it was abandoned in 1290 when the Jews were expelled from England.  Despite countless cycles of redevelopment and bombing, it was only rediscovered in 2001.  It now sits as a grounding rock in the impressive marble-clad new building.

A mikveh, (Jewish ritual bath) which dates from 1270. It was found in Milk Street in the City of London and is one of only two known medieval mikvehs excavated in the UK. Andy Chopping/Museum of London Archaeology

Perhaps the other keystone to understanding the Jewish museum is the comment of one of the chatting heads, journalist Johnathan Freedland, that all Jewish festivals contain the same three ingredients - 'we were persecuted, we survived, let's eat!'

The vaulted and temple-like ceremonial gallery still contains an array of silver from old synagogues, but  in the new design there has been more of an attempt to describe what it's for - and to give a flavour of some of the moral answers of the synagogue.  An interactive screen invites you to 'ask a rabbi' about a variety of issues - choose sexuality, and then decide if you're more comfortable with Rabbi YY Shochet from the United Synagogue telling you that marriage is between a  man and a woman and must be protected from homosexuals, or the Rabbi Aaron Goldstein whose Reform Judaism is open to all 'loving relationships based on mutual consent'.

In the main gallery, there's more than a touch of a gay trajectory to the story of UK Judaism.  Way back in the eleventh century an accepted community provided financial services. Damned, but damn useful, the community was protected by the Crown. As well as the mikveh, displays of pots and medieval scrolls  connect us to these early Jews.

Gradually pogroms and incursions made their position more rocky, before Jews were expelled and became illegal in  Britain  in 1290.  It's a shock to realise that when Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, there were officially no Jews in the UK - although we hear of many, including a community in Bristol , who were Christian in public and Jewish behind closed doors.

Returning under Cromwell and gradually building synagogues and lives, Jews were among the identifiable 'others' of 17th and 18th century society - legislated against, but throwing up the occasional influential public hero, like the boxer Daniel Mendoza.

Portrait of boxer Daniel Mendoza, late 18th century, James Gillray, London. Jewish Museum London

Judaism in the UK arguably hit a second crisis in the 1880s as a series of pogroms and disasters brought poor Jews to the UK mainly from Russia and Poland .  By then, a modest and sometimes wealthy community thrived  - Disraeli had been prime minister three times, others like Sir Moses Montefiore were well respected philanthropists and business leaders. 

In the end 150,000 arrived over 30 years - a tiny number in modern terms, but enough to gradually dwarf the 'old' community and cause a very familiar sounding outrage in the popular press: 'the people of the East End are maddened to frenzy by the filth, the insolence, and the depravity of this refuse of Europe which is being dumped on our doors' claims the Pall Mall Gazette -  and some parts of the Jewish community were scarcely more pleased.  But the eventual outcome was the flowering of a number of institutions like the Jews' Free School , which educated a third of Jewish children in Britain between 1880 and 1900.   Beautiful objects like the banner of the Baker's union and of the Jewish hospital encapsulate self-reliance and solidarity.

The Jewish Museum also constantly reminds us of how quickly  London creates and destroys. Simple interactives show how the Medieval Jewish enclave in the City of London has left behind virtually identical road patterns, but the 'Old Jewry' street sign is the only trace of its former inhabitants. In the late 19th century Spitalfields was a completely Jewish area, with big vats of herrings pickling in the streets, tailors shops and Jewish theatre - all now exist only in the museum's recreations.   It's a reminder that the Golders Green bagel sellers will also eventually be swallowed up by time and change - and re-emerge somewhere else.

Inevitably we come to the Holocaust - with a focus on how the Jewish community in Britain coped with the initially slow motion genocide playing out across the Channel.  In 1938 the Jewish Chronicle carried hundreds of advertisements from continental Jews who would be able to escape if they were given work. The requests are polite, pared down and matter of fact: 'Young Viennese Jew in Dachau since June could get release if post as trainee were offered, preferably with furrier'. 

Toy truck. Netherlands, 1940, wood. This toy was made by Leon Greenman for his son Barney who was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of two. Jewish Museum London

For decades concentration camp survivor Leon Greenman came to the Jewish Museum in Finchley each Sunday to tell the story of how he was captured in  Holland  in 1939 and his family gassed.  Greenman died aged 98 in 2008, but lives on in film and spirit in the new museum.  The toy train and sailor suit belonging to his two year old son, wiped out a lifetime ago, are the most stilling objects in the museum: standing for all the people who did not make it through the cycles of disaster and new beginning to again say 'we survived, let's eat...'.

The history is compellingly well told, but how up to date is the new museum? The refit doesn't have the ghost train theatrical panache of the new Museum of London galleries, or the interactives that are semi-submersive environments.  But it's a place where anything could happen in another sense.  In some ways the most promising parts of the new building are two large empty spaces, offering a chance for leftfield events and ongoing creative curating. 

This is now the sort of space that could host the same trendy 'lates' pioneered by the V&A - or the difficult and ever present debates about the Middle East .  Much in the museum's storytelling suggests the beginnings of a conversation - about cultural relations, history and multiple Jewish identities today.