NEW YORK — Museums and historic sites, the world's largest menorah, and a trendy new Tribeca restaurant inspired by an old-school Catskills resort. They're all part of Jewish New York, with a heritage that stretches back 400 years and a vital contemporary community that's reinterpreting old traditions for the 21st century.

New York City has the largest concentration of Jews in the world outside of Israel, according to the Jewish Databank, which put the city's Jewish population at 1.4 million in 2002. The stories of European Jews who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are relatively well-known and easy to find in places like the Lower East Side. But visitors with an interest in Jewish New York will also want to explore many other parts of the city, from the Jewish Children's Museum in Brooklyn to a 17th century graveyard on a Chinatown sidestreet.

An obvious place to start is Ellis Island, where the ancestors of so many American Jews first set foot on U.S. soil. Boats run from Battery Park — schedules at http://www.statuecruises.com — to the National Park site in New York Harbor. The Ellis Island museum offers a wealth of artifacts connected to Jewish immigrants, including a photo of a kosher kitchen that opened on the island in 1911 and an eye chart with a line of Hebrew letters.

From where the boat lets you off on your return to Manhattan, you can walk to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City. Through summer 2012, the museum is hosting a fascinating exhibit about Emma Lazarus. Lazarus' sonnet "The New Colossus" with its famous line "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddles masses," is engraved on a tablet in the Statue of Liberty's pedestal, and Lady Liberty can be seen from the museum windows. Lazarus was born in New York to an old Sephardic Jewish family; a letter about religious freedom from her great-great uncle to George Washington is part of the show.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage was created as a memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust. Many of its permanent exhibits are related to life before, during and after the Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe during World War II. Admission, $12 (children 12 and under free); closed Saturdays; http://www.mjhnyc.org/.

A little farther uptown you'll find a newcomer restaurant with nostalgic ties to New York's Jewish past. Kutsher's Tribeca, which opened in November at 186 Franklin St., is the brainchild of Zach Kutsher, whose grandparents ran Kutsher's Country Club, a popular Catskills resort in its mid-20th century heyday. The menu reinvents and updates favorite Jewish comfort foods, offering savory brisket meatballs, chopped liver made from duck, and yummy matzo ball soup with dill. You can even order caviar with your latkes — though the roe is not from sturgeon, which isn't kosher. (Kutsher's is not strictly kosher but it does not serve forbidden foods like pork or shellfish.)

Drinks at Kutsher's hark back to fun times at the resort with names like Bungalow Bunny, the term for a wife spending the summer with her kids in the Catkills while her husband worked in the city; and Bug Juice, originally a summer camp drink for kids made from a combination of leftover juices. The restaurant serves dinner from 5:30 p.m. on; beginning Dec. 20, lunch will be served at noon. On Dec. 25, Kutsher's will offer a special Chinese-themed menu in honor of the American Jewish tradition of going out for Chinese food on Christmas Day.

Next, head to Chinatown, where Jewish history is hiding in plain sight. Near the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, just south of Chatham Square, is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the U.S., at 55 St. James Place. The graveyard was used from 1682 to 1828 by Congregation Shearith Israel, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. Today Shearith Israel's synagogue is uptown at 2 W. 70th St., but the congregation was founded in the 1650s by Sephardic Jews who settled in Lower Manhattan when it was New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony. Emma Lazarus belonged to the congregation, as did her famous relative, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo.

The St. James cemetery is one of three historic Shearith Israel graveyards located on lonely Manhattan sidestreets; the others are at 76 W. 11th St., used from 1805-1829, and on West 21st Street west of Sixth Avenue, used from 1829 to 1851. You can still make out dates and names in Hebrew and English on many tombstones. "It is indeed remarkable seeing these old cemeteries amidst all the buildings — silent tributes to our ancestors and a New York of days gone by," said Rabbi Hayyim Angel of Shearith Israel.

Heading north, where Chinatown runs into the Lower East Side, you'll find the Eldridge Street Synagogue, 12 Eldridge St., http://www.eldridgestreet.org. It was founded in 1887 as the first great house of worship built by Eastern European Jews in the U.S. In 2007, after a 20-year, $18 million restoration, a museum opened onsite about the synagogue and local Jewish history.

Nearby is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 97 Orchard St., http://www.tenement.org. The building dates to 1863, but it was a time capsule when the museum acquired it in 1996: Its apartments had been sealed off since 1935. Museum tours ($22) now tell the stories of the real people who lived there. The building housed immigrants from various countries and religious backgrounds, but several tours — one called "Hard Times" and another called "Sweatshop Workers" — focus on Jewish families. The museum also offers "Foods of the Lower East Side," a walking tour ($45) with tastings at neighborhood eateries like Kossar's Bialys, 367 Grand St., and The Pickle Guys, 49 Essex St.

Other worthwhile stops in the area include the Bialystoker Synagogue, organized in 1865 and housed in an 1826 fieldstone Federal style building at 7-11 Willett St.; and the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, which offers walking tours on New York Jewish history and operates a storefront visitor center at 400 Grand St. with interesting exhibits; http://www.lesjc.org.

During Hanukkah, the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish outreach organization sponsors the lighting of a massive menorah, 32 feet tall, on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street near Central Park, Dec. 20-27. Candles are lit at 5:30 p.m., except for the Sabbath, with a 3:30 p.m. lighting Dec. 23 and 8:30 p.m. Dec. 24.

The Jewish Children's Museum, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn (792 Eastern Parkway, Kingston Avenue stop on the No. 3 train), offers hands-on interactive exhibits about holidays and culture along with a climbing wall for young children and a minigolf course. Kids can crawl through a challah bread tunnel, go shopping in a kosher supermarket and walk through the creation story from the Old Testament. A program on pressing oil for Hanukkah takes place Dec. 18-Jan. 1. Museum admission, $10; kids under 2, free; closed Friday-Saturday; http://www.jcm.museum.

Many visitors to the Jewish Children's Museum are from the local Lubavitch community but the museum gives a warm welcome to all and hosts 20,000 public school children a year in addition to families. Its mission is to promote tolerance; it was created in memory of Ari Halberstam, a local teen murdered in a 1994 terrorist attack.

On Manhattan's Museum Mile, the Jewish Museum at 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue is hosting "The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats," a moving tribute to the beloved author of books like "Whistle for Willie." Keats was born Jacob Ezra Katz in Brooklyn in 1916 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The exhibit looks at how the poverty and anti-Semitism he experienced as a child influenced his work. Young visitors will enjoy a reading room inspired by Keats' stories.

The Jewish Museum is also hosting an exhibit of 33 Hanukkah menorahs chosen from its permanent collection by another favorite children's author, Maurice Sendak, who wrote "Where the Wild Things Are." Sendak, also born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents, lost much of his extended family in the Holocaust. The Keats and Sendak exhibits are on view through Jan. 29. Admission, $12; children under 12, free; closed Wednesdays; http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/.

Finally, if you're crazy about latkes (potato pancakes eaten during Hanukkah), head to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dec. 19 at 6:30 p.m. for the third annual Latke Festival, where top chefs compete to create the best latke. Tickets are $30; http://www.greatperformances.com/latkefest.

In August 1776, George Washington and his troops retreated to Manhattan Island. The British had just routed his rebel army in Long Island, and Washington tried desperately to hold onto what little perch of New York he could. But by November, the British expelled his army from Manhattan, which the British occupied throughout the Revolutionary war.

During the occupation, thousands of rebel sympathizers fled the city, and for good reason: British troops ransacked the city, setting fire to homes, bridges and even New York’s only synagogue.  Many members of the congregation — Shearith Israel, founded in 1729 and the only synagogue in New York for nearly a century — fled the city, too.

But at least one remarkable artifact survives from the congregation’s tumultuous Revolutionary years: a Torah scroll that still has burn markings on it, and that is now on display at the New-York Historical Society. It is being shown in a mini-exhibit called “The Resilient City,” along with four cityscapes by contemporary artist Richard Hass, as part of the society’s three-year, $65 million reopening. 

“Because the Torah scroll touches on so much of American history, and of New York history, we decided to show it,” said Debra Schmidt Bach, a curator at the society. In addition to the scroll, prominently displayed on first floor, Shearith Israel — whose current synagogue, built in 1897, is adjacent to the museum — lent dozens of artifacts from its own collection for an exhibit on the society’s fourth floor titled “Treasures of Shearith Israel.”

“Most people, when they think of Jewish immigration to New York, they think of the late-19th century” when the vast majority of the today’s New York Jews arrived, said Louise Mirrer, the president and chief executive officer of the New-York Historical Society. “But [Jews] were here for a long time, and were an important part of the city. … In order to tell that story we tried to get whatever we could from Shearith Israel.”

Some of the artifacts in the fourth-floor exhibit are evidence of the congregation’s deep roots in New York — or rather, New Amsterdam. The first Jews ever to set foot in North America immigrated to Manhattan Island before it was even a British colony. 

In 1654, 23 Jews arrived in New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony, fleeing what is today Brazil. The Portuguese had just ousted the Dutch from their South American colony, and Jews were no longer welcomed there. Most went back to Amsterdam or to the British Caribbean colonies, but a handful went to what is now New York.

“The people who showed up [in New Amsterdam] in 1654 arrived there not by choice, but by accident,” said Noah Gelfand, a historian of early American Jewry who teaches at the University of Connecticut and Hunter College. Not only were Jews forced to flee Brazil once the Portuguese took over, he explained, but the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, tried to expel them, too.

Stuyvesant had little success. New Amsterdam was essentially a commercial enterprise, and Jewish merchants played a small but significant role in the company that ran it, the Dutch West India Company. The company’s shareholders, several of them Jewish, ordered Stuyvesant to allow the 23 Jewish refugees to stay. 

“Peter Stuyvesant was basically told by his employers: ‘Back off,’” said Eli Faber, a leading historian of Colonial American Jewry. “But,” Faber added, “by 1660, those Jews disappear from the record [and] I feel there’s no conclusive way to explain why they left.”

Some may have left because of lingering ant-Semitism, but a more probable explanation, Faber speculates, is that business was not going well. Four major companies back in Amsterdam dominated Dutch trade, and they may have had a negative effect on the Jewish community’s chance for success. 

But there was at least one Jew who remained in the colony — Asher Levy — and the exhibit showcases a handwritten inventory from his shop. Dated from 1683 and written in fine cursive script, the list details many goods he bought and sold: beef, wheat, clothing, sugar; he even worked at times as a barber. “In those days, people didn’t specialize,” said Faber.

The Shearith Israel congregation that lives on today, however, probably dates to the early 18th century — despite the congregation’s claim to being connected to the original 23 Jews.  Scholars like Faber argue that there is simply no evidence that those first Jews stayed for long, and that a new wave of Jews from both Amsterdam and the British Caribbean colonies began arriving in the 1680s. 

There were around 100 Jews in Manhattan at the turn of the 18th century, and the first time the congregation’s name appears is in 1706. About 20 years later, the congregation built its first synagogue in Lower Manhattan, on today’s South William Street. To consecrate the occasion, it bought two Torah scrolls — one Sephardic, another Ashkenazi — since the community was split. And during the Revolution, the British attacked both scrolls, though it is the Ashkenazi one that is now on display.

“They set one on fire, and they slashed the other with a sword,” said Rabbi Hayyim Angel, the current rabbi at Temple Shearith Israel. Jewish law requires that desecrated holy texts be buried, but Angel and other scholars speculate that the community realized the historic value of the damaged scrolls and kept them instead. 

Of course, it is not entirely clear where the scrolls were kept during the seven years of the British occupation. Most of the Shearith Israel congregants fled the city, since they were rebel sympathizers; perhaps they took the scrolls with them. But another possibility is that that the British forces protected them. The British employed Hessian soldiers to help fight the war, and at least one of them in the city was Jewish, said Bach, the curator.

In any event, the pillage of the synagogue was probably not an anti-Semitic attack. “It was part and parcel of the vandalism that was going on throughout the city,” said Bach. Moreover, British commanders harshly punished the two British soldiers who attacked the synagogue. “One was lashed so severely he died from his wounds,” she added.

Shearith Israel keeps several artifacts from its long history on display at its current Upper West Side home, though most are kept in a storage facility. But this is the first time the burned scroll has been on display since 2004, when the congregation celebrated the 350th anniversary of the Jewish arrival in New York.

On the fourth-floor exhibit, several other prized possessions are on view. There is a circumcision registry that records male births from 1756 to 1787, and it shows how connected Jews were throughout the colonies and early states. The Shearith Israel mohel traveled to Connecticut and Rhode Island, the document makes clear, performing the Jewish rite.

Rare Judaica by the famed Colonial silversmith, Myer Myers, is also on display. He made his fame, and fortune, for non-Jewish colonials. But the congregation also commissioned him, and the exhibit features Sabbath candleholders and a Chanukah menorah by Myers. 

But items from the 19th Century can be seen as well: two portraits of Jews who fought in the War of 1812; relief aid pamphlets for Civil War soldiers, a campaign led by the congregation’s woman; even a book of poems by Emma Lazarus, a congregation member and revered writer whose poem, “The New Colossus,” adorns the Statue of Liberty.

It is her words — “Give me your tired, your poor, / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — that welcomed the hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th Century. Those Jews came to define American Jewish life for the next century, and continue to do so. But few realize that Lazarus, a Sephardic Jew, had roots that went back to Colonial New York and its first congregation, Shearith Israel.

“They have a phenomenal collection,” Bach said of the congregation, “and their history is really an incredible part of American history.”

“The Resilient City” and “Treasures of Shearith Israel” opened on Nov. 11 at the New-York Historical Society, and will be on view for about four months. The museum is located at 170 Central Park West. (212) 873-3400.