The city of Plauen, in eastern Germany near the Czech border, has launched a crowd-funding campaign to help support the preservation of the surviving ruined wall of its pre-WW2 synagogue and create a memorial there.
The official launch took place last week, on April 5, with the goal of raising €15,000, or 15 percent of the total estimated costs, most of which will be covered by government funding for monument protection. The campaign will last 90 days.
Consecrated in 1930, the synagogue was designed in stark modernist form by the noted architect Fritz Landauer, who had also designed the synagogue in Augsburg. Only eight years later it was torched and destroyed in the so-called Kristallnacht Nazi pogrom. It was only recently that part of one of its original walls was discovered to have survived.
This was placed under monument protection in 2021/22.
“The badly damaged remains received emergency protection and now urgently need to be renovated and saved,” the city said on a web page about the project, called “Bruchstelle 1938.”
A virtual reconstruction of the synagogue was made several years ago by the Darmstadt.. Here’s a view of the digitally reconstructed interior:
Click here to access the crowdfunding campaign
1 comment on “Germany: City of Plauen has launched a crowd-funder to help preserve the surviving ruined wall of its pre-WW2 synagogue and create a memorial there”
Such a powerful monument to a very traumatic time. Although the building itself is ugly, what it represents certainly isn’t.