19 December 2007
Germany’s Jews have inaugurated a new synagogue in the western city of Bochum, replacing one that had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. The ceremony marked the rebirth of the Jewish presence in the city, which was virtually wiped out during the Nazi era. "We are celebrating today a victory of justice over the Nazis," Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Council of Jews in Germany, said at the ceremony. The new synagogue, which will hold up to 400 people and cost around US$ 10 million to construct, proved that Adolf Hitler’s regime had failed to
destroy Jewish life in Germany, she said.
Of approximately one thousand Jews in Bochum before the Nazi era, only 33 were left in 1946, after the fall of the Nazis. However, strengthened by the arrival of Jews from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s it now numbers a thousand once again. Germany’s Jewish community, which was reduced to just a few thousand after the Holocaust, now counts 120,000 people, most of whom came from the former Soviet bloc after 1990. In recent months, several synagogues have been renovated and opened in Germany, most notably in Berlin in August, and in the city of Munich in November 2006.
