Rising star - Jewish synagogue in Aachen, Germany - Architecture and Religion

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 1995 by Layla Dawson

A new synagogue for Aachen's surviving Jewish community sensitively combines a modern spirit with traditional influences.

Aachen synagogue, consecrated in May this year, is located on the site of the 1862 synagogue destroyed during the night of 9 November 1938. The semicircular Synagogen Platz, tucked in behind a large department store in Aachen's pedestrianised shopping zone, is a quiet oasis. The curved building frontage of honey-coloured Klinker hugs the perimeter footpath, reinforcing the simple symmetry of the hard landscaped Platz, and focuses on a green glass slab sculpture in memory of the Jewish victims of National Socialism. When Hitler came to power, the Jewish community numbered 1352 in Aachen. After the war 25 survivors returned to the city and all over Germany Jewish prayer halls, Betsaal, had a provisional air about them. They arose out of the needs of displaced persons and homeless East Europeans in refugee camps. The 1948 Jewish World Congress was convinced that no Jews would want to live in Germany and therefore no new synagogues would be required. However, 15 000 East Europeans and some Germans did remain, divided among 80 communities. By 1989, Aachen's community had grown to a modest 318 members. They gathered in a prayer room, designed by Karl Gerle in 1957, with seating for 120 men and women.

Events in Europe since November 1989 have given German Jewish communities a new perspective. Immigration from former Communist countries has increased the number of families and children. Aachen's community has more than doubled to 820. The Frankfurt am Main-based architect Alfred Jacoby, who studied at Cambridge and the E.T.H. Zurich, has designed synagogues in Darmstadt (1988) and Heidelberg (1994), won the Aachen competition in 1991. Fifty years after the Allies freed the concentration camps the building, financed by the city and the region of North Rhine-Westphalia, could be seen as an act of reparation.

The brief was twofold; to integrate the building into the street pattern, repair the city fabric on Synagogen Platz, and to achieve, within the 2899 sq m site, a permanent home for the community. New synagogues in Germany today are not only reclaiming their role in the cityscape but also acting as refuges for people hoping to find a more secure life. This involves both spiritual and practical care. The intention in Aachen was not to erect a memorial, in the way Berlin's Oranienburger Strasse synagogue has been partly restored to its former glory and partly left with its scars displayed as a witness to history, but a base for future generations of Jews in Germany. The building form sets a standard for what might eventually be built on the neighbouring vacant site. Around the corner, on an approach road leading into the Platz, the fenestration and white plastered elevation of the synagogue's secretariat knits in with the existing terrace of small shops.

After so long a diaspora there is no fixed form of synagogue architecture. When Jews felt most at risk from anti-Semitism, their prayer houses were hidden behind undistinguished house facades or in courtyard buildings off the street. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Germany, when the climate became more liberal and the Jewish community felt most assimilated, synagogues adopted an architecture like that of churches, with pews facing a pulpit in front of the Torah shrine, which took the place of a Christian altar at the eastern end of a long hall. Apart from the star of David or Hebrew script at the entrance it was often difficult, from the outside, to distinguish synagogues from churches.

Alfred Jacoby has sought to combine a clearly modern approach with an orthodox prayer hall layout. The Klinker facade to Synagogen Platz, which echoes the colour of Jerusalem stone, is solid enough to reinforce and contain the form of the public space, while the large glass entrance gives outsiders an uninterrupted view into the foyer and circular corridor around the drum of the internal double-height synagogue. Top-lighting and clear views of the sky play an important role in this structure of contrasts between solid form and transparency. In the circular corridor natural light floods on to the block walls through the glass roof supported on steel beams radiating from the drum. At night, vertical light strips set into the blockwork illuminate the corridor. A band of mosaic marks the junction between oak floor and wall and is taken up within the synagogue where circles of mosaic break the natural stone flooring. Three beechwood double doors, from the west, north and south, lead into the 300-seat synagogue. Beech seating in concentric rows surrounds the circular podium from which prayers are conducted. The Torah shrine, the Aron, with doors also in beech, is set into an alcove on the white plastered east wall and raised by two steps above the congregation. Directly in front is the lectern for Torah readings, the Almemor.

The two overriding features of the synagogue plan are the inward-looking central focus and outward-looking eastern axis, towards Jerusalem. All details and symbolic features reinforce the tension between these two points, the German Jews' physical and spiritual homes. Eight vertical stained glass windows designed by Johannes Schreiter, four each side of the Torah shrine, and two menorah lamps in milky green glass each with six symbolic candles flank the shrine. From the open sky, through the crown and a west-east slit of clear glass in the cupola, light falls vertically on to the central podium like a direct inspiration from God. No microphones are allowed to aid the speaker, so acoustic panelling of horizontal beech strips line the walls, also with integrated light strips. Women sit in a first-floor balcony, also curved and facing the shrine, segregated from the men but on a higher level.