In November, the German government announced substantial budget allocations for next year for two synagogues — that in Augsburg (which now anchors a major Jewish museum) and that in Lübeck, which has been undergoing restoration.
An announcement from the Bundestag budget committee stated that the grants — €6 million for Augsburg and €2.5 million for Lübeck — were part of an extra €280 million allocation for cultural projects in 2017.
The grant to the Augsburg synagogue will go toward general renovation of the building, which marks its centenary in 2017. Designed by Fritz Landauer and Heinrich Lömpel, the building has a domed central structure and was constructed between 1913 and 1917.
It was devastated on Kristallnacht, 1938, and renovated between 1974 and 1985, when it was reopened and redicated, with the sanctuary remaining a place of worship. The building’s west wing houses the Augsburg-Swabia Jewish Culture Museum, which was founded in 1985 as the first independent Jewish museum in postwar Germany. Its permanent exhibition celebrated its 10th anniversary this year.
Speaking at the Synagogue and Museum conference in Braunschweig, Germany, November 21-23, the Augsburg Jewish museum director Benigna Schönhagen discussed the history of both the synagogue and museum. She described the integration of the two and also outlined plans for the centenary of the building, including the fullscale renovation — the new grant, she estimated, would cover about half of the costs.
The sanctuary incorporates Byzantine, Oriental and Art Nouveau elements:
This central room is shaped like a Byzantine cross, with barrel vaults over each of the four cross arms, and is enclosed by a domed ceiling 95 feet high. Green-gold mosaic covers the reinforced-concrete dome, a highly advanced construction for its time. Elaborate tracery windows, two rings of skylights in the dome, and four brass lamp-globes bathe the sanctuary in a hushed, mystical light. The atypical, richly iconographic decoration includes a colored mosaic above the Torah ark, pictorial depictions of the High Holidays in five round panels on the east arch, depictions of the Twelve Tribes on the gallery railings, and four stucco reliefs surrounding the dome which together portray the Torah as the tree of life. The connection between the reliefs is conveyed by Biblical quotes in decorative Hebrew script.
The Carlebach Synagogue in Lübeck, built in 1880, was damaged but not burned down on Kristallnacht, but its dome and other elaborate exterior elements were destroyed, removed or simplified, and the building now is a rather austere-looking red brick structure.
