The year 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of Jewish Heritage Europe, and we will be celebrating it throughout the year with special content.
The theme of JHE’s 10th birthday celebrations is the “Anniversary of Anniversaries” — that is, using JHE’s own anniversary to feature other significant or symbolic anniversaries related to Jewish heritage that also take place this year.
In this post, we mark the 150th anniversary of the synagogue of Solingen, Germany. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938, but this year, events marking its anniversary include a virtually reconstruction of the building, installation of a commemorative sculpture, and other initiatives.
In the previous articles of this theme, we covered the 150th anniversary of Budapest’s Rumbach synagogue, the 400thanniversary of the institution of the Pitigliano, Italy Ghetto, and the 20th anniversary of the Chatam Sofer Memorial compound, and the 10th anniversary of the Jewish Community Museum in Bratislava, Slovakia.
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A series of initiatives is marking the 150th anniversary of the grand synagogue of Solingen, a city 25 km east of Düsseldorf, Germany, which was inaugurated in March 1872 and destroyed by the Nazis in the so-called Krsitallnacht pogrom in November 1938.
The main events were a ceremony in March at which a sculptural rose window four meters in diameter was mounted on the massive concrete bunker/air raid shelter the Nazis built on the site in 1944, and the unveiling of a virtual 3D reconstruction of the synagogue.
Other initiatives have included the placing of eight stolpersteine – commemorative brass cobblestones — in memory of two local Jewish families, and a series of educational workshops running from June to November.
The grand neo-Romanesque synagogue, with a distinctive octagonal-sided dome, was inaugurated on March 8, 1872, on land bought by the Jewish community eleven years before. It replaced an older and smaller synagogue located elsewhere in the city. The synagogue could host more than 200 people, and its complex also featured a mikveh, a school, and a teacher’s apartment.
On the so-called Kristallnacht pogrom — Reichspogromnacht — the night of November 9-10, 1938, when the Nazis launched coordinated violent attacks on Jews, Jewish property, and Jewish places of worship all over Germany and German-occupied territory, the synagogue was vandalized and set on fire. The following day, the dome was blown up, and two months later, authorities forced the site to be cleared at the expense of the Jewish community.
According to germansynagogues.com, in the 1960s, only about ten Jews lived in Solingen. In 1979, a plaque remembering the destroyed synagogue was placed on the bunker that had been erected on the site, and in 2021, the municipality of Solingen acquired it, intending to redesign it.
Commemorative events are held at the bunker. Plaques mounted on it in 1979, 1998 and 2012 commemorate the synagogue and list the names of Holocaust victims from Solingen. In 2018, the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Andreas Schäfer from the Solingen Art Association and the Cologne Academy of Media Arts projected an image of the destroyed synagogue onto the bunker as an “(in)visible” work of art.
The 150th anniversary events kicked off on March 12 with the ceremony unveiling the sculptural rose window, an artwork created by the local steelworker/artist Michael Brauer-Brandes.
The sculpted rose window is made of Corten steel and recalls the dimension and shape of the rose window of the destroyed synagogue. Within its space, six circles containing a Star of David are arranged like the points of a stars of David, surrounding an empty circle. During the ceremony the façade of the building was illuminated with blue light, and the artwork was highlighted with neutral light.
According to local media, the inauguration ceremony saw the participation of around 100 people, including Mayor Tim Kurzbach and Abraham Lehrer, Vice President of the Central Jewish Council, who stated that this installation is “a visible sign that the 300 Jews living in Solingen were welcome in the city.”
A separate event March 12 previewed the 3D reconstruction of the synagogue. The digital reconstruction is a project of the Max Leven Center, a local association dedicated to education and commemoration of Solingen victims of the Nazis. Max Leven was a Jewish communist activist murdered on Kristallnacht. The main aim of the digital reconstruction is to provide Solingen schools with a tool for memory work and other projects.
A high school working group that ran from 1995 to 2008 already had collected extensive information about the synagogue and created an exhibit about it.
“After 1 ½ years we knew the color of the brick and the windows, the interior design of the cupola, the interior of the synagogue and much more,” a former student recalled in an online comment in 2019.
We had rediscovered the blueprints in the estate of the architect’s son-in-law. We had exchanges of letters and interviews with residents, former high school students and emigrated Solingen Jews who gave us many new insights. A collector from Solingen presented us with a postcard showing for the first time the Star of David on the synagogue’s octagonal tower. As a consequence, we designed a small exhibition about the synagogue and its community, which since then, for more than 20 years, hangs in high school.
The digital reconstruction took four months and was carried out at its own expense by the company EXCIT3D. It used historical architectural plans and archival photographic material, as well as information provided by Bella Tabak Altura, who lived in the town until she was seven.
The virtual reconstruction presents both the exterior and interior of the building and can be accessed via several platforms, including augmented reality and virtual reality headsets, as well as video tours posted on YouTube and other portals. In addition, the entire building or parts of it can also be printed in 3D.
As part of the 150th anniversary events, the Max Leven Center at the end of June launched a series of workshops open to everybody, focusing on topics such as local Jewish history, places of remembrance, and Jewish life.
Funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the workshops run through the summer and autumn and are also designed to gather ideas about the future of the bunker that occupies the area of the destroyed synagogue and how to develop it as a place of remembrance.
The outcome of such discussions will be presented at a closing event, to be held on November 14.
Solingen’s Jewish cemetery, located on Esterweg, survived World War II. It was founded probably in the early 18thcentury, and its oldest surviving gravestone dates from 1820. The last burial took place in April 1941.
Since 1987, a school, the Alexander-Coppel-Gesamtschule, has maintained the cemetery. The Coppels were a prominent Jewish family in Solingen. Alexander, the last chairman of the synagogue congregation, died in 1942, soon after he was deported to the Terezin ghetto.
A school project group takes care of the gravesites and the cemetery area at Estherweg. More than 300 students have studied the history and culture of the former Jewish community.
According the the Solingen municipality, there are plans to create a “topography of remembrance” in the city center. This will include the bunker on the synagogue site as well as the Jewish cemetery and the future city premises of the Max Leven Center.
Click here to see more details about the anniversary events
See more about the virtual reconstruction on the Excit3D web site
1 comment on “Anniversary of Anniversaries: Marking the 150th anniversary of the destroyed synagogue in Solingen, Germany with commemorative art and digital reconstruction”
Thank you, and congratulations to the Max Leven-Center in Solingen. I would like to remind you that my epigraphical team and I published in 1996 (!) the full documentation of the Jewish cemetery of Solingen: Photographs,Texts, Translations, Commentaries, Genealogical tables etc.:
“Der juedische Friedhof in Solingen. Eine Dokumentation in Wort und Bild”. Herausgeber/Publisher: Stadtarchiv Solingen 1996. 232 pp. ISBN 3-928956-08-6
Should be digitalized, to be put online by us on “epidat” with your help, dear Stadtarchiv Solingen …
Michael Brocke