Jewish Museum
March 22, 2007
The new museum, to be opened to the public on Friday, is part of a new complex on Munich's central Jakobsplatz, which also houses a new synagogue and community center. Its permanent collection will focus on different aspects of Jewish life, spotlighting religious rites and festivals of the Jewish year.
Objects include manuscripts from the Renaissance, a Jewish wedding ring from 1500, and a 550-year-old prayer book for the Jewish Sukkoth holiday, or Feast of Tabernacles.
The building, a cube-shaped structure designed by Saarbrücken architects Wandel Hoefer Lorck, is only the second in Germany after Berlin especially built to house a Jewish museum. There are some 900 square meters (9,687 square feet) of exhibition space.
"The building should appeal to Jews and non-Jews alike and be avenue for open discussion about Jewish history, art and culture," Christian Ude, Munich's mayor, said in a statement.
The museum is located just blocks away from where Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels ordered the destruction of Munich's main synagogue on the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, in November 1938.
Three floors of Judaica
The building, whose 13.5-million-euro ($18 million) construction cost was paid by the city, has three floors. The permanent exhibition on the lowest floor focuses on Jewish life in Munich and includes models of the city's five previous synagogues. The other two floors have space for temporary exhibitions. At the beginning of 2008, works by contemporary Jewish artists will be shown.
One collection of Judaica to be shown is that of Alfred Pringsheim, a mathematician and father-in-law of the author Thomas Mann. It includes Renaissance-era ceramics and silver items which are on view together for the first time in Munich in more than 70 years. Pringsheim had fled to Switzerland during the Nazi era, where he died in 1941.
According to the president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, Charlotte Knoblauch, rthe museum completes Munich's new Jewish center.
"With it, visitors will have the opportunity to experience a living and diverse Judaism in the rooms of our own community and learn about the long history of Munich's Jews," she said.
While Germany's Jewish community in 1933 numbered 565,000, by 1950, there were just 37,000. But since German reunification, thousands of Jews have moved to Germany, mostly from the Soviet Union, thanks to government policies encouraging immigration. The World Jewish Congress says Germany has the world's fastest-growing Jewish community, conservatively estimated at more than 100,000 today.