SAN FRANCISCO — A visually striking new museum will give tourists who flock here to see the cable cars and Alcatraz a chance to learn something about Jewish culture and maybe even pick up a word or two of Hebrew.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum, designed by a renowned architect, Daniel Libeskind of New York, rises from the shell of a century-old power substation blocks from San Francisco’s financial district. The new building’s signature features are two blue steel structures designed to evoke the letters in the Hebrew word for living: chai.

“I was inspired from the very beginning by this place. It’s a very unique place,” Mr. Libeskind said as the museum was opened to reporters yesterday. “Immediately, I had a vision of l’chaim.”

The Polish-born architect, who created the master plan to rebuild the World Trade Center site, said the San Francisco building is deliberately more vivacious than Jewish-themed museums he has designed in Germany and Denmark.

“Europe, unfortunately, has had that shadow hanging over it — that irreversible shadow of the destruction of the Jewish people and others,” Mr. Libeskind said. “This is a place that celebrates Jewish life. This is about America … It’s a fundamentally very, very different building in its spirit, in its response.”

The power station has its own history of birth, death and renewal. It dates to 1881, was damaged by fire shortly before the devastating 1906 earthquake, and was all but destroyed in the quake itself. It was quickly rebuilt in a classical revival style by a San Francisco architect, Willis Polk. In keeping with the “City Beautiful” concept promoted by Daniel Burnham of Chicago, intricately carved reliefs and other costly details were added even though the public couldn’t enter and the building faced a rarely used alley,

“That’s the greatness of Burnham’s idea of architecture for the people,” Mr. Libeskind told The New York Sun.

The new building is composed of an elongated main structure designed to evoke a Hebrew letter, chet, and an addition that consists of a gleaming, 65-foot-high blue steel box, which is set on one of its corners and is intended to represent another letter, yud. On the inside, Mr. Libeskind’s trademark out-of-kilter walls, which extend even to the rest rooms and sometimes lean towards or way from the floor, can make it challenging to hang paintings.

“Not every museum is a museum for 19th century, 18th century paintings,” the architect said. “It’s not necessary to create one more box, one more extruded form.”

The opening exhibits include drawings from a longtime New Yorker cartoonist, William Steig; a collection of contemporary and older artworks interpreting the story of creation in the book of Genesis, and audio compositions inspired by still more Hebrew letters.

Some of the building’s symbolism would be hard for even a keen observer to divine. Lines in the walls of the museum’s auditorium represents the various roads to Jerusalem, the designers said.

The museum’s setting in San Francisco’s hippest neighborhood, South of Market Street, or SoMa, also offers sharp contrasts. A Four Seasons hotel hangs over part of the new building, while some of the city’s seediest streets are just a few blocks away.

A local redevelopment authority gave the site to the Jewish group in the mid-1990s for $1, but requirements that the historic edifice of the power station be undisturbed made the project a pricey and protracted one. “That’s probably the most expensive dollar ever spent,” the museum’s director, Constance Wolf, quipped.

Ms. Wolf said she expects a mix of tourists and locals, but she’s not concerned that exhibits about San Francisco’s Jewish traditions will bore visitors from New York or Paris. “What we’re told by focus groups is people who are going to come want to learn about the community … They’re really interested in the local Jewish history and Levi Strauss is just one example,” the museum director said, referring to the German-born Jewish purveyor of blue jeans who set up shop here in 1853.

An exhibit of memorabilia collected from Bay Area Jews is often whimsical. One item on display is a T-shirt reading, “Yo semite,” created by a counselor at a Jewish summer camp near the national park of nearly the same name.

In an effort to demonstrate the centrality of education to Jewish culture, the facility’s classrooms occupy the center of the building’s main floor. Another sign of the museum’s commitment to youth comes at the ticket counter. Children under 18 will be admitted free, while adults must ante up $10.

The museum also contains a few nods to the technologically savvy who work in nearby Silicon Valley. An audio guide to the architecture of the mostly new structure is available via cell phone, disposing with the need for the clunky audio recorders used to guide and gouge visitors at many galleries.

The new San Francisco museum, set to open to the public on Sunday, has been more than a decade in the making. One challenge was raising $80 million for the building and an endowment.

“You have to believe in it,” the arhcitect said yesterday as he sat in a sunny plaza gazing at his creation. “You have to really be a marathon runner in this process. It’s not for a sprinter.”

Mr. Libeskind’s project at the World Trade Center site has also dragged out, and plans for a performing arts center there have been particularly contentious. “We need it,” he told the Sun yesterday. “I hold my fingers crossed that the performing arts center will be built.”