The legacy of Kristallnacht still haunts Hamburg as the city rebuilds a synagogue burned during a Nazi pogrom

(Conversation) – Johanna Neumann was 8 years old when she witnessed the destruction of the Bornplatz synagogue in Hamburg by a mob of locals and Nazis. They “screamed and threw stones at the wonderful glass windows,” she later said in an interview. oral history interview. Other students at a Jewish school nearby, he described a mountain of prayer books and Torah scrolls lying in the dirt on the street, desecrated and set on fire.

It was 1938, five years into Adolf Hitler’s reign. The Bornplatz Synagogue, a majestic neo-Romanesque building, was one of the largest in the country. Now it stood desecrated, one of hundreds of Jewish institutions damaged or destroyed in the state-sponsored pogrom of November 9-10. On that day became known as Kristallnachtor Night of Broken Glass, a euphemism for many broken windows.

The attacks killed hundreds of Jews and up to 30,000 Jewish men were killed. sent to concentration camps. Blaming the Jews for the violence, the Nazi government fined the community an impossible sum of 1 billion Reichsmarks. In Hamburg, the Jewish community was forced to sell a damaged synagogue, which was soon demolished.

The location of this former landmark has changed over the past few years. dispute site Residents discussed whether and how to restore the old synagogue in order to demolish the memorial standing there today.

How researcher of German-Jewish historyI believe this plan touches an open nerve: how Germany grapples with the need to memorialize the past while simultaneously supporting a revitalized Jewish community today. For some, the restoration of the old synagogue is a sign of the return of Jewish life to the city; for others, restoring a site is about erasing past traumas.

Road to memory

Germany’s reckoning with the Holocaust and its responsibility to honor the victims is a long and winding process. Immediately after the Holocaust, most Germans turned inwardmostly focusing on one’s own hardships, and not dwelling on the suffering of the Jewish victims.

Catalysts for Change Enabled Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in 1963-1965, in which 22 camp employees were convicted. Witness testimony and widespread media coverage increased awareness of the atrocities in the concentration and death camps. Broadcast American mini-series “Holocaust”In 1979, the past became the present in every West German living room. Local activists also began uncovering Jewish history in Germany’s small towns.

A symbolic moment in Germany’s reckoning was the 50th anniversary of the November pogrom. The 1988 celebrations saw a flurry of events in both West and East Germany, including the opening ceremony Jewish Museum Frankfurt. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl attended the event, a sign that attention to Jewish life and history is becoming part of thoughtful policy.

By 1988, the Bornplatz synagogue had been converted into a parking lot. One could walk by and easily forget that this was once the center of Jewish life. But the city of Hamburg celebrated the 50th anniversary by opening a new memorial on the site. Designed by a local artist Margrit KahlThe mosaic floor depicts the outline of the destroyed synagogue and its dome.

According to an architectural historian Alexandra ClayKal’s memorial was “one of the firstin its own way, to designate “an empty place in the city as an object of memory.” It now serves as a deliberately open space in the busy university district.

Soon the square was renamed in honor Joseph Carlebachthe last synagogue rabbi deported to the Jungfernhof concentration camp near Riga. He was killed during a mass execution in a nearby forest in March 1942.

Old-new building

In Hamburg, members of a Jewish organization that is the official representative in city and government institutions are planning restoration of the old synagogue – a way to revitalize Jewish life in the same space where it once flourished.

Idea gained momentum in 2019 after anti-Semitic attack at a synagogue in Halle, a city in central Germany, on Yom Kippur. An online petition supporting restoration has received more than 107,000 signatures, as well as support from Christian leaders and local politicians.

Other synagogues were built on the sites of destroyed synagogues in other German cities. for example Dresden and Mainz. These buildings were deliberately designed to look modern and should not be confused with the originals destroyed during the Holocaust. They also did not move an important memorial.

On Bornplatz, on the other hand, residents imagined construction copy of the originaleven at the expense of Kahl’s potential work.

Several dozen intellectuals, both Jews and non-Jews, categorically against this ideaclaiming that empty space is capable of sending a message. They argued that restoring a replica of the synagogue on top of the memorial would allow erase the memory of destructionas if the November pogrom had never happened.

Whose Judaism?

Whether to fill that space with an old or new building isn’t all that’s up for debate. The controversy over the synagogue concerns Jewish life in Germany today, he argues. Hamburg sociologist Suanna Krasmannand about which Judaism should be perpetuated.

Following the Holocaust, the collapse of the Soviet Union and German reunification, the demographics of the Jewish community in Germany changed radically. Today the vast majority are approximately 100,000 people are associated with the Central Council of Jews in Germany. are immigrants from former Soviet Union or their descendants.

In Hamburg, the main Jewish community is led by Rabbi Shlomo Bistritzky of Chabad, an Orthodox denomination with no historical roots in pre-war Germany. On the contrary, critics of the reconstruction of the Bornplatz synagogue note that the city occupies an important place in the history of liberal Judaism and the Reform movement. Historian Miriam Rurupfor example, drew attention to the deplorable state of the former church on Puhlstrassethe movement’s first purposefully built synagogue.

The past is the present

Despite objections, the Hamburg Assembly voted unanimously in 2020 in favor of recovery. Next year feasibility study concluded that the project would indeed have to move the Kahl memorial or build entirely on top of it.

At the same time, the report notes: “We cannot restore the historic synagogue on Bornplatz. The Bornplatz Synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis.” The new synagogue will not be the same as the 1906 building; the past cannot be restored, as if nothing had happened.

The project, and the potential Jewish museum, are still several years away from completion. It is unclear what form they will take. Eighty-six years after the November pogrom, Germany is still reliving its past; The psychological landscape of Hamburg is still marked by an invisible “under construction” sign.

(Yaniv Feller, assistant professor of religion and Jewish studies, University of Florida. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect the views of Religion News Service.)