The largest Jewish community center in West Germany was officially opened in Frankfurt Sunday, symbolic of the revival of Jewish life and culture in the country where the Holocaust was planned.
The $50 million edifice was funded by the Jewish community, the Frankfurt, municipality and the Federal State of Hesse. It houses a synagogue, a school and kindergarten, a home for the aged and a youth center, offices and meeting rooms.
There is also a sports arena which will serve as headquarters for the local Maccabi club and a training center for athletes. The large kosher restaurant on the premises was reported booked solid for the next few weeks because of the International Book Fair in Frankfurt which attracts hundreds of Jewish publishers from all over the world.
Salomon Korn, the architect who designed the center, said it was the first ever built in Frankfurt where Jews have lived for 800 years. The structure has Jewish motifs. The entrance is dominated by a huge decalogue. There are large slashes across the twin tablets which Korn said symbolize the past rupture between Jews and Germany.
The school and kindergarten will enroll non-Jewish children up to a quarter of capacity. Community officials said the purpose is to avoid isolation and to promote understanding. “We do not want to live in a ghetto,” said Michel Friedman, a spokesman for the Jewish community. He said the center as a whole would be open to the general public.
About $7 million was spent on security devices which include bullet-proof windows and a closed circuit television monitoring system. The community, however, rejected a proposal to surround the building with a high wall.
The center is located in Frankfurt’s residential West End and there is a certain irony in its locale. The neighborhood was the scene of leftwing demonstrations in the 1960’s and 1970’s, some of them directed against the alleged wrongdoings of Jewish real estate developers. The latter were castigated in the play “Garbage, the City and Death” by the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which is widely considered anti-Semitic.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
