It houses the Erfurt Treasure, a hoard of medieval coins, goldsmiths' work and jewellery found in 1998.

Owing to this careful conservation and restoration, medieval as well as younger building phases are still easy to perceive.In 2007 a rare and particularly well-preserved Jewish ritual bath, a Mikveh, dating from c. 1250 was discovered by archeologists not far from the Old Synagogue, near Erfurt's Krämerbrücke (Merchants' Bridge).

[4] The collection, which weighs almost 30 kilograms (66 lb) in total, was found in 1998 in the wall of a house at Michaelisstraße 43, in a medieval Jewish neighbourhood, near the Synagogue.

[12] It also displays facsimiles of the Erfurt Hebrew Manuscripts, a collection of significant religious texts dating from the 12th–14th century.

[5] One of the Erfurt Manuscripts is a copy of the Tosefta, a compilation of oral law attributed to tannaim, Jewish scholars who lived in Palestine and Babylonia c. 1-200 CE.

[13] Not all scholars agree, but the Tosefta is generally thought to provide interpretation of unclear sections of the Mishnah, the earliest redaction of the Oral Law.

[14] Moses Samuel Zuckermandl (also Zuckermandel) was the first to point out the importance of MS Erfurt in his seminal study on it published, in German, in 1876.

In 1884 the community constructed the Große Synagoge (Great Synagogue), a magnificent Moorish Revival building.

[18] In 1947 the site of the Great Synagogue, which had been confiscated by the Nazis, was returned to the Jewish community by Erfurt City Council.

[19][20] It is the New Synagogue which is used for worship by the present-day Jewish community in Erfurt; it was set on fire by a group of neo-Nazis in April 2000.