The Great Synagogue in Munich was an integral part of the city’s old town for decades. Inaugurated in 1887, it gave spiritual shelter to a community of around 9,000 Jews. Until Adolf Hitler came to power. The National Socialist leader personally ordered the temple to be demolished, making it one of the first Jewish places of worship to be destroyed in Nazi Germany.
The operation was scheduled for July 8, the date on which “German Art Day” was commemorated. And the leaders of the Jewish community were not officially informed until just hours before. Dozens of people worked hard at night to try to preserve as many objects and Torah scrolls as possible.
It was a clear harbinger of what was to come just four months later, when the military and members of the Hitler Youth carried out the infamous attacks against Jewish citizens and their property throughout Germany and Austria as well. The famous Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) would also include synagogues.
Eighty-five years later, the Great Synagogue in Munich has been brought back to life after construction workers involved in a project to restore the city’s ancient underwater infrastructure discovered large blocks of stone in a river some eight kilometers from where the temple was located.
Once the remains were analyzed – among which stone flowers, ornate friezes and even a tombstone were included – it was confirmed that the walls of the old synagogue were used as fill in the Isar river, located south of Munich, after a flood which took place in 1956.
The different parts of the temple were found between four and eight meters deep. Now that the exact whereabouts of the remains have finally been discovered, city officials will move some 150 tons to a city yard for careful examination, a process that could take a couple of years.
After taking a first look at the recovered objects, the director of the Jewish Museum in Munich, Bernard Purin, has been able to identify the ancient tombstone that used to be located on the altar of the Torah and that shows the Ten Commandments in Hebrew script.
Officially, the temple was removed to make room for a car park. But there is also a version of the story that says that Hitler ordered the demolition of the site, located next to the Nazi party headquarters, because he considered it “an eyesore.” The company in charge of the demolition, the Munich-based construction company Leonhard Moll, stored the rubble in its yard until it was used to fortify the infrastructure of the river dam in the mid-1950s.
Before 1938, almost every major city in Germany had a synagogue. Most of these worship spaces were destroyed in November 1938 during Kristallnacht. The few that survived were spared because they were too close to buildings owned by non-Jews to be demolished by the Nazis.
The destruction of the Munich synagogue was the “beginning of the exclusion, persecution and destruction” of German Jews, the city’s mayor, Dieter Reiter, said in a statement. “The fact that today we find remnants of the magnificent building that once defined the urban landscape is a stroke of luck and deeply moves me,” he said.
