Ohel Jakob: The Synagogue That Came Back
Why is it significant?
Stand in the middle of St.-Jakobs-Platz and face the building that looks like a block of pale, rough-cut stone with a glowing lantern of glass set on top. This is Ohel Jakob, the main synagogue of Munich. This walk through the Nazi era begins not with the darkness, but with what returned after it.
Key Facts
| Place | Ohel Jakob: The Synagogue That Came Back |
|---|---|
| Address | St.-Jakobs-Platz 18, 80331 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.13480, 11.57280 |
| Part of Walk | Munich 1918-1945: The Nazi Era, Its Victims and the White Rose |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the middle of St.-Jakobs-Platz and face the building that looks like a block of pale, rough-cut stone with a glowing lantern of glass set on top. This is Ohel Jakob, the main synagogue of Munich. This walk through the Nazi era begins not with the darkness, but with what returned after it.
The synagogue opened on the 9th of November 2006, sixty-eight years to the day after the pogrom night of 1938, when synagogues burned all over Germany. The date was chosen deliberately. The heavy stone base recalls the Temple in Jerusalem, built to last. The glass above, wrapped in a fine bronze mesh, recalls a tent, the dwelling of a people on the move. Ohel Jakob means the Tent of Jacob. Beside it stand the community centre and the Jewish Museum, together a whole Jewish quarter in the heart of the old town.
Below the square, an underground passage links the community centre with the synagogue. It is called the Corridor of Remembrance, and its walls carry the names of the Jews of Munich who were murdered in the Holocaust. Every visitor to a service, every child going to a celebration, walks past those names first.
The building did not come easily. Its driving force was Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Munich Jewish community since 1985, who survived the war as a child hidden on a farm in Franconia. She insisted the synagogue belonged in the centre of the city, not in a back street. And in 2003, police uncovered a plot by a neo-Nazi group to bomb the ceremony for laying the foundation stone. That is why you see police here day and night... a reminder that this story did not end in 1945.
The name itself is a memory. The first Ohel Jakob, an Orthodox synagogue on Herzog-Rudolf-Straße, was set on fire during the pogrom night of 1938. Munich's great main synagogue had already been torn down months earlier, on Hitler's personal order. To understand how a city came to that, we have to go back twenty years. Walk north through the old town to Kardinal-Faulhaber-Straße, and look down at the pavement.