The Jewish Museum has reopened with a £10m remake - and new stories. Simon Tait reports

It’s hard to present something like the Jewish Museum without making it a kind of sectarian memory bank, said Alan Yentob, the BBC’s creative director. “But it’s not just for religious people, not just for Jews, it’s for all people interested in their history and in their shared past” he said.

He and Nigella Lawson were opening the museum behind its genteel Georgian terrace façade after a £10m transformation. The space has been tripled, the museum having been able to acquire an old piano factory.

It has enabled them to do more justice to their colletions, and those of the London Museum of Jewish Life with which the Jewish Museum amalgamated in 1995.

It is a story, as Nigella Lawson said, of a people maintaining its distinctiveness but also being deeply interwoven in the society around; a lesson, Yentob added, that is relevant to all immigrant issues, currently to the French government’s confrontation with its Muslims of the wearing of the burka. “It’s a debate that has to happen” he said.

The museum does not debate, however, but sets out its stories clearly with humour, scholarship and sometimes almost unbearable poignancy.

There are four distinct sections, beginning with a multimedia array of a range of contemporary Jewish people and a brief account of them, from a marathon-running great-grandmother who was born in India, to a fourth generation smoked salmon manufacturer, to a taxi driver, to an ex-army engineer commended for her bravey during the 2005 London bombing.

Then, being shown in public for the first time, is a mikveh, a ritual bath dating from about 1270, found in London and the oldest object in the museum. Many of the objects on show now haven’t been on display before.

The Living Faith gallery gives a pragmatic and respectful introduction to Judaism, with a representation of a synagogue, a description of the life rituals of Jewish life, from birth through bar mitzvah, marriage – and divorce – and death. Four rabbis from four different schools of the faith give dissertations on their beliefs, and there are precious Torah scrolls, including a travelling silver scroll made by George III’s silversmith, Frederick Kandler.

The history gallery should begin with the bringing of Jews to this country for the first time by William the Conqueror because they had already proved the huse as businessmen in France, but instead the visitor is greeted by a panel with a few of the personal stories of Jewish immigrants to Britain: the tiny doll Edith Rothstein smuggled in her clothing when she joined the Kinder Transport from Germany to England in 1938; the hazelnuts Simon Berman brought from Lithuania in the 1880s as a souvenir; the Washington Senators baseball Ned Temko brought with him in 1987.

The story of the Jews in Britain is by turns glorious and shameful. Edward I banned them from Britain in 1290 and they did not have their reswidency rights restored until 1656. But during the exclusion Jews had lived, worked and risen in English society, keeping their faith secretly. Elizabeth I had a Jewish physician, Rodrigo Lopez, who was eventually executed, though as a suspected spy.