Golden Dome, Missing House: Jewish Berlin & the Scheunenviertel

From the New Synagogue a policeman saved in 1938 to a dance hall from 1913: hidden courtyards, an old cemetery, brass stumbling stones and the brave women of Rosenstraße in Berlin's old barn quarter

Berlin · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Neue Synagoge: The Golden Dome of Oranienburger Straße

Oranienburger Straße 28-30, 10117 Berlin, Germany

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.
2. Leo-Baeck-Haus: The College That Taught Judaism as a Science

Tucholskystraße 9, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Find the plain stone building at Tucholskystraße 9, with its tall windows and heavy doorway. No dome, no towers, nothing that begs for a photograph... and yet some of the sharpest minds of German Jewry walked through that door every morning.

This was the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the College for the Science of Judaism, founded in 1872 and housed in this building from 1907. It was a liberal seminary, open to students whether they were Jewish or not, men or women, and it studied Jewish history and sacred texts with the tools of modern scholarship rather than with faith alone. The street was called Artilleriestraße back then; today it carries the name of the writer Kurt Tucholsky.

Among its teachers was Rabbi Leo Baeck, the most respected liberal rabbi in Germany, who from 1933 led the national body representing German Jews under the Nazi regime. And among its students was a young Berliner named Regina Jonas. She wrote her final thesis on whether a woman could serve as a rabbi, argued that she could, and in December 1935 she was ordained, the first woman rabbi of modern times... decades before that became normal anywhere in the world.

The Nazis closed the college in 1942. Regina Jonas was deported to Theresienstadt, where she went on preaching and caring for the other prisoners, and in 1944 she was murdered in Auschwitz. Leo Baeck was deported to Theresienstadt too, and survived; he died in London in 1956. For decades Jonas was almost forgotten, until her papers turned up in an East Berlin archive in the early 1990s and her story was finally told.

Today the house bears Leo Baeck's name and is the seat of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. So the building the dictatorship emptied now speaks for Jewish life across the whole country. That is a quiet kind of victory. Walk back up to Oranienburger Straße and head east, until the trees of Monbijoupark open up on your right, down towards the river.
3. Monbijoupark: The Vanished Palace and the Barn Quarter

Monbijoupark, Oranienburger Straße, 10178 Berlin, Germany

Walk into the shade of Monbijoupark and down towards the water, where the Spree slides past and the curved dome of the Bode-Museum rises on the island opposite. Lawns, a children's paddling pool, people stretched out on the grass... and a strange absence. A royal palace stood right here.

Schloss Monbijou began in the early 1700s as a summer pavilion for a powerful countess at court, and grew into the riverside palace of Queen Sophie Dorothea, the mother of Frederick the Great. Its name is French for my jewel. In the nineteenth century it became the Hohenzollern Museum, crammed with royal relics. Bombs wrecked it in the Second World War, and around 1960 East Berlin cleared the ruins away. A Prussian palace was not something the new socialist state cared to rebuild.

The palace sat at the edge of the Spandauer Vorstadt, the suburb that grew up outside the old city walls along the road to Spandau. Craftsmen, soldiers, Huguenot refugees from France and Jewish families settled here. Jewish life in modern Berlin starts with a date: 1671, when the Great Elector allowed fifty wealthy Jewish families, freshly expelled from Vienna, to settle in his lands. They were tolerated, taxed and restricted at every turn... but they stayed.

And the nickname of this whole district? In the 1670s the authorities ordered the hay barns out of the crowded town because of the fire risk, and rows of barns, Scheunen, went up outside the gates. Strictly speaking, the name Scheunenviertel, the barn quarter, belongs to the streets a little further east, around today's Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. But Berliners now use it for this whole web of lanes north of Hackescher Markt.

Around 1900 these streets were among the poorest in Berlin, home to many Jewish families, with prayer rooms tucked into back courtyards, Hebrew lettering over shop doors, and Yiddish in the air. Leave the park at its eastern end, pass under the S-Bahn arches at Hackescher Markt, and cross over to Rosenstraße, where a group of stone women is waiting for you.
4. Rosenstraße: The Women Who Stood in the Street

Rosenstraße, 10178 Berlin, Germany

Find the small park on Rosenstraße and the reddish stone figures standing in it: women huddled together, heads bowed, a man bent double, hands reaching out. The sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger called the work Block der Frauen, the block of women, and it was unveiled in 1995 to remember one of the most astonishing scenes of the Nazi years.

On the twenty-seventh of February 1943 the Gestapo began rounding up the last Jews still working in Berlin's factories. Most were sent straight to Auschwitz. But around two thousand people, most of them men married to non-Jewish women, were brought here, to a building of the Jewish community that stood on this street. Their families had no idea whether they would ever see them again.

And then the wives came. First a few, then hundreds, standing in the street in the late winter cold, day after day, calling for their husbands. Armed guards appeared; the women scattered when threatened, and came back. In the middle of the Reich capital, in 1943, unarmed German women protested openly against the regime, and they did not go home.

In early March most of the men were released, and some who had already been sent to Auschwitz were even brought back. Historians still argue about why. Some believe the regime had not yet planned to deport these men at all; others think Goebbels flinched at the sight of unrest in his own city. What nobody disputes is the courage it took to stand on these cobbles.

Just behind this park stood Berlin's first great synagogue, the Old Synagogue in Heidereutergasse, consecrated in 1714, wrecked in the war and never rebuilt. Read the information columns beside the park; they tell the protest's story in the words of those who were there. Then walk north across Hackescher Markt to Rosenthaler Straße, and slip into a narrow, scruffy courtyard right beside the polished Hackesche Höfe.
5. Haus Schwarzenberg & Otto Weidt's Workshop for the Blind

Rosenthaler Straße 39, 10178 Berlin, Germany

Walk into the courtyard of Rosenthaler Straße 39 and feel the city change texture. Next door, the Hackesche Höfe are scrubbed and polished; in here the walls are layered with posters, stencils and sprayed faces, iron creatures cling to the stairwells, and the plaster looks as if nobody has touched it since 1945. This is Haus Schwarzenberg, kept raw on purpose by an artists' association since the 1990s.

The Hackesche Höfe next door, built in 1906 and 1907, are eight interlinked courtyards, the first one clad in glazed Art Nouveau tiles by August Endell, and they are lovely. But the story you came for is in this scruffy side wing. During the war, these rooms held the brush and broom workshop of a man named Otto Weidt.

Weidt was a small manufacturer, almost blind himself, and he employed blind and deaf Jewish workers. Because the Wehrmacht needed brushes, he could declare their work important to the war effort. He bribed officials, falsified papers, and more than once marched into the Gestapo to argue his workers back out of custody. In a back room, behind a wardrobe, a whole family hid for months.

His secretary was a young woman called Inge Deutschkron, who survived in hiding and later wrote about him. Weidt even travelled east, close to Auschwitz, to help a young woman he cared for, Alice Licht, and she survived the war. But he could not save everyone, and many of his workers were deported and murdered. In 1971 Yad Vashem recognised him as Righteous Among the Nations. His workshop is now a small museum, and the same building houses the Anne Frank Zentrum.

Before you leave, look closely at the walls: the art here changes every few weeks, layer upon layer, so no two visitors ever see quite the same courtyard. Then head back out, walk north along Rosenthaler Straße and turn left into Sophienstraße, one of the prettiest little streets in Mitte, towards a baroque church tower.
6. Sophienkirche: A Baroque Survivor

Große Hamburger Straße 29, 10115 Berlin, Germany

Step through the gateway into the quiet churchyard and lift your eyes to the tower of the Sophienkirche: slim, pale, stacked in tiers like a wedding cake and topped with a copper spire. In a city where bombs and planners flattened almost everything, it is a small miracle of survival.

The church was built in 1712 and 1713, funded by Queen Sophie Luise, the third wife of King Frederick the First, which is why it carries her name. The tower followed in the 1730s, and Berliners like to say it is the only baroque church tower in the city that survives in its original form. Inside, everything is light and plain, the way a Prussian Protestant congregation liked it.

Wander among the old graves. The historian Leopold von Ranke, who taught the world to write history from the archives, is buried in this churchyard, and so is Carl Friedrich Zelter, a mason by trade who became a composer, a close friend of Goethe, and the teacher of the young Felix Mendelssohn... grandson of the philosopher you are about to meet down the street.

Now picture the streets a few hundred metres east of here, across Rosenthaler Straße. That was the old Scheunenviertel proper, crowded with poor Jewish immigrants who had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe. In November 1923, at the height of hyperinflation, mobs rampaged through those streets, beating people they took to be Jews and looting their shops. A pogrom, in the middle of Berlin, ten years before Hitler came to power. Few people remember it today, but it was a warning.

The church came through the war, and in the East German decades it stayed a living parish while the Jewish life around it had all but vanished. Leave by the gate onto Große Hamburger Straße and walk a few steps south, to a quiet lawn behind a wall, where Berlin's Jews buried their dead for a century and a half.
7. The Old Jewish Cemetery & Moses Mendelssohn

Große Hamburger Straße 26, 10115 Berlin, Germany

Stop at the low wall of Große Hamburger Straße 26 and look through to a green space shaded by old trees, its ground carpeted with ivy, only a few gravestones standing. On the pavement in front, a group of gaunt bronze figures, women and children, stands huddled together.

This was the first cemetery of Berlin's new Jewish community, opened in 1672, barely a year after the first families arrived, and used until 1827. Thousands of people were buried here. The most famous of them is Moses Mendelssohn. He came to Berlin in 1743 as a poor fourteen-year-old boy, entering, the story goes, through the Rosenthaler Tor, the one gate Jews were allowed to use, where they had to pay a toll like livestock... and he became one of the most admired philosophers of the German Enlightenment.

His friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing modelled the hero of Nathan the Wise on him, the play that pleads for tolerance between Jews, Christians and Muslims. Mendelssohn translated the Five Books of Moses into German, printed in Hebrew letters, to lead his community into German culture without leaving its faith. His gravestone here is a copy; the original was destroyed. The building next door was the Jewish boys' school, and today it is a Jewish secondary school bearing his name.

In 1943 the Gestapo had the cemetery destroyed. Next to it stood the Jewish old people's home, and from 1942 the Gestapo turned it into a collection camp. Many thousands of Berlin Jews were held in its rooms before being loaded onto the trains, to Theresienstadt, to Auschwitz. The bronze group in front, by the sculptor Will Lammert, stands for them.

It is Jewish custom to leave a small stone on a grave rather than flowers, and you will often see pebbles resting on Mendelssohn's stone. Then cross the street and walk a little way north, to a gap between two houses where there is nothing to see at all... which is exactly what you need to see.
8. The Missing House & the Stumbling Stones

Große Hamburger Straße 15-16, 10115 Berlin, Germany

Look at the gap in the row of houses: a patch of empty ground between two bare firewalls, where a building should be and is not. High up on those walls hang small white plaques, scattered at different heights, as if someone had pinned notes to the sky.

This is The Missing House, a work by the French artist Christian Boltanski, created in 1990, just as Germany was being reunified. The house that stood here was destroyed by a bomb in the last months of the war. Boltanski and a group of students searched the archives for everyone who had lived in it, and set their names, their jobs and the years they lived here on the walls of the neighbouring houses, each plaque roughly at the height of the floor where that person once had a home.

The quiet genius of it is that Boltanski did not sort them. Jewish tenants who were deported are named alongside non-Jewish neighbours who died in the air raid or simply moved away. Names, professions, years, nothing more. One house, one staircase, one list. It turns an abstract number back into what it always was: a building full of neighbours who knew each other's footsteps.

Now look down at the pavement and you will start to notice small brass squares set among the cobbles. These are Stolpersteine, stumbling stones, created by the artist Gunter Demnig. Each one is laid outside the last freely chosen home of a victim of the Nazis, and engraved with a name, a year of birth, and a fate: deported, murdered, fled. Demnig began in the 1990s; today there are more than a hundred thousand across Europe, and many thousands in Berlin alone. To read one, you have to bow your head.

Some Berliners come out on the ninth of November, the anniversary of the pogrom night, to polish the brass until it shines again. Keep walking north along Große Hamburger Straße to the little green square at its top end, Koppenplatz, and look for a table with an overturned chair.
9. Koppenplatz: The Abandoned Room

Koppenplatz, 10115 Berlin, Germany

In the middle of the little square sits a bronze room without walls: a square of parquet floor, a plain table, two chairs. One chair is pushed back, as if someone had just stood up. The other lies tipped over on the floor.

The sculpture is called Der verlassene Raum, the abandoned room, by Karl Biedermann and Eva Butzmann. It came out of a competition held in East Berlin in 1988, for the fiftieth anniversary of the November pogrom, and it was finally installed in 1996... by which time the state that had commissioned it no longer existed.

It recalls the moment of the knock at the door, when people were taken from their flats so suddenly that dinner stayed on the table and the chairs fell where they were. Around the edge of the floor runs a bronze band with lines from a poem by Nelly Sachs, the Berlin-born Jewish poet who escaped to Sweden with her mother in 1940, and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. Walk around it slowly and read.

The square itself is named after Christian Koppe, a city councillor who in the early 1700s gave this land as a burial ground for the poor, and a small monument to him still stands here. So this quiet patch of grass has been a paupers' cemetery, a neighbourhood square and a place of remembrance. Few corners of Berlin carry three such different lives at once.

Watch how people treat the chairs: children clamber over them, someone rests a coffee cup on the bronze table. Nobody can quite decide whether that is disrespect or exactly what the artists hoped for, a memorial that is lived with rather than walked past. Leave the square westwards along Linienstraße, turn left down Tucholskystraße, and left again into Auguststraße, to a long brick school building from the 1920s.
10. The Former Jewish Girls' School on Auguststraße

Auguststraße 11-13, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Take in the long brick façade at Auguststraße 11 to 13: clean lines, rows of identical windows, a severe and almost modernist calm. Next to the older tenements around it, it looks as if it had arrived from another decade... and it did.

This was the Jewish Girls' School, built between 1927 and 1930 by Alexander Beer, the architect of the Berlin Jewish community, in the sober style of the New Objectivity. It was a bright, modern school for a confident community, with a gym, a roof terrace and large windows. After 1933, as Jewish children were driven out of state schools, its classrooms filled up, and teachers fought to give the girls something like a normal childhood in impossible times.

In 1942 the Nazis closed every Jewish school in Germany. Many of the pupils and their teachers were deported and murdered. Alexander Beer himself, the man who had designed synagogues and schools for this community, was deported to Theresienstadt, and died there in 1944. The building that had been full of girls' voices stood silent.

In East Berlin it became an ordinary school again, until the 1990s, and then it stood empty and crumbling for years. In 2009 it was handed back to the Jewish community, which leased it out, and since 2012 it has been busy once more, with galleries, a restaurant and people on the stairs. A building that was a crime scene of silence now hums with conversation, and the community decided that was the right way to remember.

The whole of Auguststraße became the gallery mile of reunified Berlin in the 1990s, when artists moved into empty ground floors, and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art opened further along this street in a former margarine factory. Now stroll east along Auguststraße for a couple of minutes, towards a garden strung with lights and an old dance hall behind it.
11. Clärchens Ballhaus: Dancing Since 1913

Auguststraße 24, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Stop at Auguststraße 24 and look past the garden with its strings of lights to the old building behind, its façade still a little battered, as if it had decided not to bother with makeup. Listen: on many evenings music drifts out to the street, a waltz, a tango, a swing number.

Clärchens Ballhaus opened in 1913, just before the First World War, founded by Fritz Bühler and his wife Clara, the Clärchen of the name. It was never a glamorous place for the rich. It was for ordinary Berliners: shop assistants, workers, soldiers on leave, widows and widowers, couples who met on this dance floor and came back to celebrate their anniversaries on it.

Upstairs is the Spiegelsaal, the hall of mirrors, with its peeling plaster and tarnished glass, a room that came through the war when so much around it did not. The ballroom kept on going through two dictatorships and the long division of the city, and the dancing never really stopped. Old-timers taught steps to students, and after the Wall came down, a whole new generation of Berliners discovered it.

And that is the strange gift of this district. The same few streets held the Jewish schools, the prayer rooms in back courtyards, the cemetery and the collection camp. They also held this: people dancing on a Saturday night. Everyday life and catastrophe shared the same pavements, the same tram stops, the same bakeries, and that is precisely what makes the history here so close and so hard.

So end your walk the way Berliners have ended their evenings here for more than a century. Sit in the garden, or step inside and watch the couples turn. You started at a golden dome a policeman refused to let burn, and you finish where life, stubbornly, went on dancing. Hackescher Markt and the S-Bahn are about ten minutes away, back down Große Hamburger Straße.