Qualla: Old Synagogue (Essen)

Old Synagogue (Essen): Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit artwork: Edmund Körner (1874-1940); file: James Steakley, Public domain. The exterior survived. That is the strange, terrible fact at the center of this building's story. On the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, when Nazi mobs across Germany and Austria burned synagogues to the ground in the violence that came to be called Kristallnacht, the Old Synagogue in Essen was set on fire too. The interior - the deep-blue tiled walls, the gold mosaics, the bima, the Torah ark, the library, the prayer hall that could hold around fourteen hundred worshippers - all of it was destroyed. But the dome held. The walls held. The building stood the next morning, hollowed out but visibly intact, a charred shell at the edge of the city center. It was still standing in 1945, after the Allied bombing campaign reduced most of Essen around it to rubble. It is still standing today.

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Image: artwork: Edmund Körner (1874-1940); file: James Steakley | Public domain

Old Synagogue (Essen): A Community's Statement, 1913

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. By the early twentieth century Essen's Jewish community had grown to several thousand. The community had been formally established in 1858. Rabbi Salomon Samuel was appointed in 1894 and over the following years pushed for a synagogue that would announce, in stone and copper and ...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Old Synagogue (Essen): The Night the Inside Burned

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0. From 1933 the Nazi regime began the systematic exclusion of Jewish Germans from public life - the boycotts, the Nuremberg Laws, the steadily tightening choking-off of livelihoods and rights. Then came Kristallnacht. In Essen, the mob came for the New Synagogue and set the interio...

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Image: Tuxyso | CC BY-SA 3.0

Old Synagogue (Essen): The Erasure of 1960

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the war, the gutted shell stood unused at the edge of the city. Survivors of the Holocaust who had returned to Essen used the attached Rabbinerhaus as a center, then built a smaller new synagogue in 1959 for the diminished community. In 1959 the city acquired the old buildi...

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Image: Tuxyso | CC BY-SA 3.0

Old Synagogue (Essen): The Fire That Changed Minds

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Globe-trotter, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1979 a short circuit started a fire that severely damaged the design exhibition. By then West German attitudes toward historic preservation - and toward Holocaust memory - had begun to shift. The Essen city council made a different decision than its predecessors had. It would ...

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Image: Globe-trotter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Old Synagogue (Essen): The Building Today

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tuxyso, CC BY-SA 3.0. The official reopening took place on 13 July 2010. The Alte Synagoge is now a working memorial and a working cultural center. There are exhibitions on Jewish history, on the destroyed community, on Jewish religious practice. There are concerts and readings and plays. The Salomon ...

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Image: Tuxyso | CC BY-SA 3.0