On Monday, the Museum of Jewish Heritage will open a landmark exhibition, “Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust.” The result of years of work, the exhibition will address what the museum’s director, David Marwell, called “the important and neglected history” of Jewish responses to the Holocaust.

The impulse behind the exhibition, Mr. Marwell said in a preview yesterday, was to address a question often asked by visitors to the museum: Why did the Jews go passively to their deaths? “We knew that the question was based on a false assumption,” Mr. Marwell said, “but there was no public educational vehicle to combat this ignorance. So we looked to ourselves to create a remedy.”

The result is an exhibition that documents “the Jewish response in its complexity,” as the curator of the exhibition, Yitzchak Mais, said. As the film at the beginning of the exhibition acknowledges, many Jews did not distinguish the Nazis’ early policies from an older and familiar tradition of anti-Semitism in Germany, which they had learned to endure. As things got worse, many believed they could ride out the storm. But, from early on, Jews also rebelled against Nazi policies and persecution. After the scope of the Nazis’ genocidal goals became clearer, thousands joined the armed resistance.

The exhibition focuses on many types of resistance, from private acts like continuing forbidden religious rituals to violent steps like blowing up trains and bridges. Courageous young women acted as couriers, facilitating communication between groups of Jews isolated in ghettos. In the ghettos, people printed underground newspapers and maintained underground archives. The exhibition includes several images by the photographer George Kadish, who documented the lives — and too often, the deaths — of his neighbors in the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania. In one case, Kadish photographed a message that one neighbor wrote on a wall in his own blood, before he died: “Jews, revenge!”

The exhibition includes filmed testimony of survivors, including Shalom Yoran, who became a partisan after promising his mother that he would avenge the death of his fellow Jews. There were more than 90 armed uprisings in ghettos, and, more astoundingly, uprisings in three death camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibór. In Auschwitz, four young women who worked outside the camp in a munitions factory smuggled gunpowder in their clothing and passed it to the men in the Auschwitz underground, who were planning an uprising. On October 7, 1944, the men blew up one crematorium, burned another, and killed four SS men before the uprising was put down. The women were eventually identified and hanged.

Mr. Mais said he hopes the exhibition will change people’s perspective on the Holocaust and lead them to ask new questions. “We want people to ask: What is resistance? How do you resist something that has never been encountered before?”