Pieces of Munich Synagogue, Destroyed on Hitler’s Orders, Found in River
Eighty-five years ago, Munich’s main synagogue was demolished on direct orders from Adolf Hitler — a terrible harbinger of the destruction to come.
The synagogue was among the first Jewish places of worship to be destroyed in Hitler’s Germany. Five months later, the Nazis organized countrywide pogroms and laid waste to most of the country’s synagogues, as well as Jewish cultural institutions and businesses.
The Munich main synagogue was lost to history, or so it seemed. But this week, during a project to refurbish old underwater infrastructure, a construction crew found pieces of the synagogue in a river five miles from where it once stood in Munich. The discovery was a shock, but a joyful one for Munich’s Jewish community.
The items construction workers found, including columns and a large piece of the synagogue’s Torah shrine, were 15 to 25 feet below the surface of the Isar River at a site south of Munich. The building’s remnants were used as landfill material when workers rebuilt an underwater structure after flooding in 1956.
Source: The New York Times
