New Synagogue (Offenbach am Main)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
View of the parish grounds from Kaiserstraße: the synagogue is in the middle in the background

The New Synagogue in Offenbach am Main , built between 1955 and 1956, is the spiritual center of the city's Jewish community life. The sacred building was the first synagogue to be built in Hesse after the Holocaust . The building was constructed according to plans by the architect Hermann Zvi Guttmann and redesigned and expanded from 1997 to 1998 according to plans by the community chairman Alfred Jacoby .

The building is a cultural monument according to the Hessian Monument Protection Act .

history

Former synagogue on Goethestrasse: The building is now used for events under the name Capitol

After the synagogue in Offenbach was desecrated during the Reichspogromnacht November 9-10, 1938 and the interior was completely destroyed by arson, it was sold to a cinema operator during the Second World War and converted into a cinema and theater. After the war, the synagogue was returned to the Jewish community. However, it was too big for the community, which had become very small as a result of the Shoah, and could no longer be used meaningfully, so that the building was left to the city of Offenbach for cultural use.

Only 18 of the congregation, which had almost 1,500 members in 1933, had returned to their former hometown of Offenbach after the collapse of the German Reich . As elsewhere, the Jewish community in Offenbach was also considered a settlement community. It was mainly Jews from Eastern Europe who came to the community. German Jews, such as Max Willner , who was born in Gelsenkirchen and survived the deportation to the concentration camps and became the first community council, also came. The city of Offenbach had offered the community in 1946 to build a new synagogue. The community council rejected the offer because it assumed that all Jews would emigrate from Germany. Two years later, the city repeated its offer, which eventually led to the construction of the new synagogue.

On September 2, 1956, after a two-year construction period , the new synagogue was inaugurated on a garden plot opposite the old synagogue according to plans by the architect Hermann Zvi Guttmann , one of the most important synagogue builders after 1945. It was the first synagogue in Hesse after the Holocaust and should be the symbol of a new beginning. The building plans are now in the holdings of the Jewish Museum Berlin .

In 2016, the Offenbach community based in the synagogue had around 800 members.

building

Construction from 1956

The architecture of the new synagogue, both inside and outside, corresponded to the formal language of the 1950s. Guttmann designed other synagogues, for example for Düsseldorf and Osnabrück . Common to all designs is the modern and unmistakably Jewish construction, which takes into account the liturgical requirements of Jewish worship. The building in an east-west direction is set back 30 meters from Kaiserstraße . The central axis is exactly aligned with the center of the dome of the former synagogue. At the rear, an intermediate building was connected to a community hall that was built at the same time. The small hall of the synagogue consists of a rounded structure in solid construction with a concrete ring at the top, in which the window pillars were anchored. The flat sloping roof is covered in copper. Originally there was a portal facing the street made of black, Swedish granite with a round window above it with a Star of David . On the side of the rounded wall there are large windows with leaded glazing. The synagogue offered space for around 90 people.

Guttmann's synagogue architecture not only reflected the rupture that had arisen through the persecution and destruction of German Jewry, but also the fragility of Jewish life in the midst of the still young German society. After Auschwitz , the synagogue and the community center were supposed to offer the Jewish community protection, refuge and an inner home for the individual. This was expressed in the location as in the structure of the synagogue. The property provided by the city of Offenbach was surrounded by a garden with the synagogue in the middle. The buildings were barely noticeable from the street side. The rounded outer walls of the synagogue enveloped the people as if in a tallit , the prayer shawl that the believer puts around his shoulders during the service. According to his own admission, Guttmann left the synagogue in the tension between modern form and liturgical-orthodox law.

Rebuilt in 1998

In the background the upper half of the synagogue

Because of the influx of Jews, especially from the then still existing Soviet Union , community chairman Willner had sought to expand the synagogue and build a new community center since the late 1980s. While only about 100 Jews lived in Offenbach in the 1950s, the number of community members had increased to about 900 by then. The community ruled out the withdrawal of the former synagogue on Goethestrasse, although the city of Offenbach had offered this to the community. The community cited the resulting costs as the reason for the rejection.

Up to this point in time, the synagogue remained a largely underrated building in view of its unspectacular architecture, although the architect and expert for synagogue buildings Salomon Korn had drawn attention to its quality in 1988. According to Korn, the Offenbach synagogue has the characteristics characteristic of Guttmann's later synagogue buildings: curved outer walls, large light openings and the spatial dominance of the Torah shrine. It was not until the community's intention to demolish the synagogue and replace it with a new building that in the mid-1990s a public, nationwide discussion about the importance of the synagogue and ultimately its recognition as an architectural and cultural monument worthy of protection was initiated.

The community then stopped their planning and followed the requirements of the State Office for Monument Preservation, according to which the synagogue had to be the starting point for the expansion. The synagogue was redesigned and expanded from 1995 to 1997 according to plans by the community chairman Alfred Jacoby , and a new community center was built. The synagogue from 1956 has since been penetrated by a glass ark in the form of a lens-shaped building. Again, the top of the new building points exactly to the former synagogue in Goethestrasse and thus illustrates the historical context. The premises of the new community center are connected to the side and back. In the newly designed interior, which now offers space for 160 people, the interplay of light maple wood, metal and blue window glazing dominates. In the middle is the lens-shaped, two-tier platform with the bima , the desk for the thoracic reading , on a light parquet floor . The Torah shrine in the apse symbolically points to the rising sun and thus gives the east wall of the building its appropriate meaning.

The artistic design was also important: The lead windows, inscribed with texts from the Torah and kept in iridescent shades of blue, were created by the London artist Brian Clarke ; Uwe Fischer designed two seven-armed candlesticks, Monika Finger the ritual washstand, the lectern and the Torah shrine.

The extension includes new community and classrooms, a kindergarten, a youth center, a senior citizens' club and a large community hall.

Monument protection

The original building from the 1950s, which is now penetrated by the extension, is a cultural monument due to the Hessian Monument Protection Act . As the first synagogue in Hesse after 1945 and one of the earliest in Germany, it is a historical monument of supraregional importance. It is also an important testimony to the work of the architect Hermann Zvi Guttmann , who after 1945 created numerous synagogues and the Jewish memorial in the former Dachau concentration camp.

literature

  • Paul Arnsberg : The Jewish communities in Hesse. Beginning - fall - new beginning. Volume 2. Societäts-Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-7973-0213-4 .
  • Paul Arnsberg: The Jewish communities in Hesse. Images - documents. Volume 3, Roether, Darmstadt 1973, DNB 740104624 , pp. 158-176.
  • Thea Altaras : Synagogues in Hesse. What has happened since 1945? Langewiesche publishing house , Königstein im Taunus 1988, ISBN 3-7845-7790-3 , 176 f.
  • Thea Altaras: Synagogues and Jewish ritual immersion baths and: Synagogues in Hesse - What happened since 1945? Part II. Langewiesche publishing house, Königstein im Taunus 1994, ISBN 3-7845-7792-X , p. 144.
  • Pinkas Hakehillot: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities from their foundation till after the Holocaust. Germany Volume III: Hesse - Hesse-Nassau - Frankfurt. Edited by Yad Vashem , 1992, pp. 49-57. (Hebrew)

Web links

Commons : Synagoge Offenbach am Main  - collection of images

Remarks

  1. ↑ See also: List of cultural monuments in Offenbach am Main .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b The Synagogue of the Jewish Community Offenbach aM On: jgof.de , accessed on January 6, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Festschrift for the 50th anniversary of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Offenbach: An almost boundless optimism in Offenbach's synagogues after 1945. From : dienemann-formstecher.de , October 2000, accessed on January 6, 2016.
  3. ↑ Inv.-No .: Konvolut / 483/0. Collection Hermann Zvi Guttmann. In: jmberlin.de. Retrieved November 28, 2019.
  4. ↑ János Erkens: The History of the Synagogue. In: fr-online.de . April 10, 2016, accessed August 24, 2016 .
  5. ↑ a b c d State Office for Monument Preservation Hesse (ed.): Kaiserstraße 109: New Synagogue In: DenkXweb, online edition of cultural monuments in Hesse .
  6. ↑ a b Places of Faith. (PDF; 3.11 MB) In: offenbach.de. Offenbach am Main City Administration, November 7, 2013, p. 6 , accessed on January 6, 2016 .

Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 34.6 "  N , 8 ° 45 ′ 27.9"  E