Berlin, Germany
Fasanenstraße Synagogue
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Fasanenstraße Synagogue about 1916
Basic information
Location
Fasanenstraße, Charlottenburg, Berlin
Status
Closed by the Nazis in 1936, burned during Kristallnacht in 1938, destroyed during Allied bombing in 1943
Leadership
Former rabbis included Leo Baeck
Architectural description
Neo-Romanesque with Byzantine elements
Completed
1912
Specifications
Capacity
1,720
The Fasanenstraße Synagogue was a liberal Jewish synagogue in Berlin, Germany opened on 26 August 1912. It was located in an affluent neighbourhood of Charlottenburg on Fasanenstraße off Kurfürstendamm at numbers 79–80,[1] close to the Berlin Stadtbahn and Zoo Station.
Construction
The synagogue was built from 1910 on in a Neo-Romanesque style with distinctive Byzantine elements and was large enough to accommodate up to 1,720 worshippers. While older synagogues had usually been erected in backyards, the temple with its richly decorated frontage was meant as a built statement of the advanced Jewish emancipation in the German Empire. A scholar of Progressive Judaism rabbi Leo Baeck was one of its leaders. Its main cantor for many years was Magnus Davidsohn and Richard Altmann (who was blind) was its organist.
Emperor Wilhelm II presented the synagogue with a ceremonial marriage hall richly adorned with Maiolica tiles from his manufacture in Kadinen, dedicated to the Jews of Germany, and, as Magnus Davidsohn's daughter, Ilse Stanley, describes in her book The Unforgotten, visited the temple upon its opening. Kurt Tucholsky on this occasion criticized a voluntary assimilation of German Jews while the ruling class had nothing but contempt for them.[2]
Closure and Kristallnacht
Interior of the synagogue after Kristallnacht, November 1938
Further information: Kristallnacht
The synagogue functioned for only twenty four years until the Nazi authorities forced it to close in 1936. The building was destroyed during the Kristallnacht pogrom in the night of 9–10 November 1938. From the Beer Hall Putsch commemoration in Munich, Minister Joseph Goebbels personally gave the orders to smash the synagogue,[3] at that time the largest in Berlin. SA troopers broke into the building, shattered the interior and finally set the synagogue on fire with fuel they got from a nearby filling station—in the presence of the fire department, which confined itself to prevent the flames from spreading to neighbouring houses.
In 1943, the remains of the building were again devastated during an Allied air raid.
Jewish Community Center
Jüdisches Gemeindehaus, 2008
After the Holocaust, most of the few Jews who returned to Berlin were immigrants from Eastern Europe. Chairman Heinz Galinski promoted the grounds of the former Fasanenstraße Synagogue to be chosen for the building of a new Jewish Community Center (Jüdisches Gemeindehaus Fasanenstraße). On 10 November 1957, the West Berlin mayor Willy Brandt attended the ceremony of laying its cornerstone. The old ruins were removed, but a few surviving elements, such as the main portal, were kept as decoration of the new building designed in the Modern style of the 1950s. The Gemeindehaus was inaugurated on September 27, 1959.
On November 9, 1969, during ceremonies to commemorate the Kristallnacht, the Tupamaros West-Berlin attempted to attack the Community Center; the bomb, supplied by undercover government agent Peter Urbach, failed to explode.[4]
Since 2006 the building hosts the Jewish adult education centre and administrative departments as the Community Center has moved to the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße.