Rosenstrasse - Berlin

This is the site of Berlin’s first public synagogue, the Old Synagogue. The community was told it could only build to one storey high and this was a problem due to the tradition of separating men and women in the temple so they needed two floors for the separate women’s balcony. So they excavated the floor below street level and built an impressive Synagogue, one storey high – and one deep! Opened in 1714 in the presence of Queen Sophie Dorothea. It survived the Kristallnacht because part of the synagogue had become a Post Office.

That said, it later became a casualty of wartime bombing. After the war, the synagogue was reduced to ruins and the post-war Jewish community was deprived of the power and prominence to salvage the desecrated synagogue.

In 1953, the community in Berlin was forced to split into East and West and while the West retained approximately 4,000 members, the registered community in the East was only a few hundred. This was where the modern Jewish community of Berlin began and nearly where it ended. On this corner of the grassy plot stood a Jewish community centre which like many was commandeered by the Nazis and turned into a detention centre. It was the scene of a remarkable public protest under the Nazi regime.