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Workers Discover Destroyed German Synagogue

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

MUNICH, GERMANY (Worthy News) – Eighty-five years after Adolf Hitler ordered the destruction of the German city of Munich’s main synagogue, construction workers have discovered that it wasn’t lost to history.

During a project to refurbish old underwater infrastructure, a construction crew found pieces of the synagogue in a river eight kilometers (five miles) from where it once stood in Munich.

Construction workers found stone tablets carved with the Biblical Ten Commandments, columns, and a large piece of the synagogue’s Torah shrine. They were up to 25 feet (7.62 meters) below the surface of the Isar River at a site south of Munich, officials said.

The building’s remnants were used as landfill material when workers rebuilt an underwater structure after flooding in 1956.

The discovery was a shock but a joyful one for Munich’s Jewish community. “Last Wednesday, the Munich water works department found stones with some decorations under the water,” Bernhard Purin, director of the Jewish Museum in Munich, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Thursday. “They started their own research, and via Google they found out that the same company that had destroyed the synagogue in 1938 did the renovation work in 1956.”

The city department contacted state landmarks officials, who then called Purin.

“I went with them to the site on Thursday, and it became immediately clear that the broken stones were part of the Great Synagogue,” Purin said. “The first thing I saw was the Tablet of Laws. They saw it as an important piece, so they separated from the rest.”

ARRANGING TRANSPORT

The city is arranging to transport the stones to a storage area and will continue searching the area for more segments of the synagogue. It will be a complex task: The Ten Commandments alone weigh more than half a ton.

Purin said the museum has many historical photos of the synagogue, which will aid the identification of the architectural fragments. “I am hopeful that in a few months, we will see that more parts of the Torah Ark are among the stones.”

The find is “quite important to me for two reasons,” he added.

“On one hand, the main synagogue was one of the biggest in Germany. And on the other hand, it was a document of the positive Jewish life in Germany from the 1870s to 1933. The broken stones are also a monument for the Holocaust.”

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, says the Great Synagogue in Munich was the first synagogue the Nazis destroyed in Germany.

On July 8, 1938, Jewish community members were given a few hours’ notice, and volunteers spent that night removing the Torah scrolls and ritual objects, historical records show.