Neue Synagoge: The Golden Dome of Oranienburger Straße

Why is it significant?

Stand on the pavement of Oranienburger Straße and let your eyes climb the façade: glazed brick and terracotta, two slim corner towers, and above them a ribbed dome of gold that catches even a grey Berlin sky. It looks like something from Granada or Cairo, dropped among Prussian apartment blocks.

Key Facts

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Stand on the pavement of Oranienburger Straße and let your eyes climb the façade: glazed brick and terracotta, two slim corner towers, and above them a ribbed dome of gold that catches even a grey Berlin sky. It looks like something from Granada or Cairo, dropped among Prussian apartment blocks. That was exactly the point. The New Synagogue was consecrated in September 1866. Eduard Knoblauch designed it, and when he fell ill, Friedrich August Stüler finished the job. With around three thousand seats it was the largest synagogue in Germany, and the Moorish style was a statement of confidence: Berlin's Jews were saying, we are here, we are prosperous, we belong. Otto von Bismarck attended the inauguration. And in 1930, Albert Einstein stood in the great hall and played the violin at a charity concert. On the night of the ninth of November 1938, SA men forced their way in and set fire to the building. Then something unusual happened. Wilhelm Krützfeld, the head of the local police precinct at Hackescher Markt, arrived with a few officers, sent the arsonists away and called the fire brigade, insisting that the synagogue was a protected historic monument. It was a bureaucrat's argument, made by a man with a pistol on his belt... and it worked. He was summoned and reprimanded for it, and he left the police early, in 1943. Fire could be stopped once, but not history. From 1940 the Wehrmacht used the hall as a storehouse, and in November 1943 Allied bombs gutted it. In 1958 the ruined main hall was pulled down. What you see now is the front building with its dome, rebuilt and re-gilded, which reopened in 1995 as the Centrum Judaicum. Behind the façade lies an open space where three thousand people once prayed. Notice the police officers and the barriers outside. Jewish institutions in Berlin are guarded around the clock, which tells you something about the present as well as the past. Now walk a few steps west to the corner and turn left into Tucholskystraße, to a sober stone building where Judaism was once taught as a science.