Building synagogues after 1945: an almost boundless optimism

However, Jews and non-Jews had only tentatively approached each other in the first post-war years. At the synagogue dedication, community chairman Max Willner recalled, according to a chronicler's report, that the city of Offenbach had offered to build a new synagogue for the Jewish community as early as 1946. However, the community council at the time rejected the offer because it assumed that all Jews would emigrate from Germany. Two years later, the city repeated its offer, which ultimately led to the construction of the current synagogue, said Willner.

As in other places, the Jewish community of Offenbach was also regarded as a community in liquidation, so to speak. In any case, the concentration camp survivors only saw it as a stopover on the emigration route to Israel, the United States or South America, and the ostracism by international Jewish organizations such as the "Jewish Agency" prevented Jewish life in Germany from being anything other than provisional during the first decade after the Shoah.

Only a few of the almost 1,500 members of the community in 1933 had returned to their former home town of Offenbach after the Shoah, no more than 18 people. Although many members of the community had been able to leave Hitler's Germany, more than 400 Offenbach Jews had been murdered in the concentration camps. It was mainly Jews from Eastern Europe who came together in this community in the summer of 1945, but also German Jews such as Willner, who was born in Gelsenkirchen and had survived deportation to the Sachsenhausen, Auschwitz, Flossenbürg and Dachau concentration camps. Soon after the end of the National Socialist dictatorship, the Jews met to pray in the synagogue on Goethestrasse, which had been desecrated during the November pogrom of 1938 and whose building shell had remained undamaged.

In the years that followed, the community turned its attention inward, as it had to alleviate the psychological and physical suffering of the survivors, provide help in obtaining compensation and support those in need. Religious life also had to be rebuilt, which was completely different from that of the community before 1938. This was because the Jews who had come to Offenbach from Eastern Europe lived their tradition, which was linked to the Orthodox rite. However, this stood in contrast to the reformist tradition of Offenbach's Jewish community, which dated back to the early 19th century and was liberal in the early 20th century, represented by the internationally renowned rabbis Salomon Formstecher and Max Dienemann.

Although it went unnoticed by the public for a long time, from the very beginning there was an internal and external connection between the synagogue on Goethestrasse, which had been desecrated by the National Socialists and misused as a cinema and Nazi rally site, its monumental, outward-looking gesture and the withdrawn, self-focused new house of prayer and assembly. The synagogue on Goethestrasse, crowned by a 30-metre-high dome and visible from afar in a middle-class neighbourhood, symbolized, as the community chairman Max Goldschmidt said at its inauguration in 1916, the year of the Great War, that the Jews had left the "narrow alley", meaning the Judengasse, later the Große Marktstrasse, and had "conquered a place in the sun" and wanted to assert it. There, on the border of the old Offenbach, the Jewish community had its synagogue since the beginning of the 18th century.

The synagogue on Goethestrasse was also a testimony to the self-confidence that the German-Jewish middle classes had gained in the late 19th century, a "striking example" of the "last heyday of synagogue building in Germany" that began at the turn of the 20th century, as Dieter Bartetzko, architecture critic for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote in an article.

"After Auschwitz", on the other hand, the Guttmann Synagogue and the community center connected to it were first and foremost intended to offer the Jewish community protection, refuge and an inner home. This was expressed in both the location and the structure of the synagogue. The plot of land provided by the city of Offenbach at Kaiserstraße 109 was surrounded by a tree-lined garden, in the middle of which Guttmann placed the synagogue, supplemented at the rear by the community center - assembly hall, apartment for the community leader and offices. The buildings were barely visible from the street. The rounded outer walls of the synagogue enveloped the people as if they were wearing a "tallit", the prayer shawl that worshippers wrap around their shoulders during the service.

By his own admission, Guttmann left the synagogue in the tension between modern form and liturgical orthodox law. Guttmann explains: "The synagogue is built in a modern style. The outer walls of the actual temple are rounded. The portal consists of a glass entrance in a frame of black Swedish granite. Above it is a round window with the Star of Zion. This and the large windows on the side walls of the synagogue building are leaded glass. The roof is covered with copper. ... Despite the modern form, the liturgical-orthodox law and tradition are observed: Opposite the entrance, at the end of the main axis, which runs in an east-west direction in accordance with the liturgy, is the Torah shrine in the apse. In the middle of the room is the place of the bima (also known as the almemorah), the lectern at which the Torah is read during the service. The Eternal Light on the east wall - a special construction - symbolizes the Jewish diaspora, artistically expressed by the pillar of fire and the cloud that led the people of Israel through the desert and into the Promised Land."

For four decades, Guttmann's synagogue remained a widely underestimated building due to its unspectacular architecture, even though Salomon Korn, architect and Vice President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, drew attention to its quality in 1988. According to Korn, the Offenbach synagogue bears the characteristic features of Guttmann's later synagogue buildings, for example in Hanover and Düsseldorf: curved outer walls, large light openings and a spatial dominance of the Torah shrine. However, it was not until the Offenbach Jewish community's intention to demolish the synagogue and replace it with a new building and community center in the mid-1990s that the significance of Guttmann's synagogue was the subject of a public debate that attracted nationwide attention and ultimately led to its recognition as an architectural and cultural monument worthy of protection.

The Hessian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, however, informed the community that the Guttmann Synagogue was not only worth preserving for historical reasons, for example because it was the first newly built synagogue in Hesse after 1945, but also because it was characterized by the artistic features of the architecture of the 1950s. Any changes or even demolition would require approval under monument protection law. The Jewish community then halted its plans and followed the requirements of the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, according to which the Guttmann Synagogue had to be the "starting point" for an extension.

Due to the influx of Jews, especially from the then still existing Soviet Union, the community chairman and later honorary citizen Max Willner had been striving to expand the synagogue and build a new community center since the end of the 1980s. While only around 100 Jews lived in Offenbach in the 1950s, the number of community members had increased to around 900 in the meantime.

The Guttmann Synagogue, which was finally redesigned in 1997 according to plans by the current community chairman Alfred Jacoby and inaugurated in the presence of the Hessian Minister President Hans Eichel and the Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, refers to the history of Offenbach's Jews in two ways: On the one hand, its preservation means that the traces of the new beginning of Jewish life in this city after the Shoah are still recognizable, and on the other hand, its reference to the former house of prayer and assembly is now unmistakable - the top of the synagogue, which has been extended to 160 seats by means of a glass shell, points to its historical predecessor opposite.

According to Jacoby, he used modern design elements inside the Guttmann Synagogue, some of them geometrically austere. London artist Brian Clark created leaded windows inscribed with texts from the Torah in iridescent shades of blue; Uwe Fischer designed two seven-branched chandeliers and Monika Finger (both Frankfurt) designed the ritual washstand, reading desk and Torah shrine. In addition
the new community center connected to the synagogue contains a kindergarten, youth center, senior citizens' club and a large event hall.

The synagogue and community center are not only intended to help integrate the many Eastern European immigrants in Hesse's second-largest community; after decades of seclusion, the buildings are seen as a sign to the community. At the opening of the new Jewish center, Jacob Kerem-Weinberger, a member of the Jewish community's board at the time, said: "We no longer want to hide behind trees, we want to be a visible part of Offenbach and participate in the life of the city."

Text / Author information: Anton Jakob Weinberger is chairman of the Max Dienemann / Salomon Formstecher-Gesellschaft Offenbach e.V..
This publication is an abridged version of a contribution that can be accessed on the Internet