Jewish Europe
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Festival in Berlin A vital sign of Jewish life in Germany is Berlin's 11th Annual Jewish Culture Festival, two weeks of klezmer (Jewish folk/jazz) and liturgical music, films, and other events, which begins this Nov. 10. Berlin has also restored the ornate New Synagogue in the eastern section, built in 1866 for a prosperous congregation. It barely survived the Nazi Kristallnacht in November 1938, when more than 200 synagogues were vandalized and burned; more damage resulted from Allied bombings in 1943. Fifty million dollars later, the New Synagogue has been rededicated as a Jewish cultural center. Still under construction in Berlin is the new Jewish museum in a mysterious structure of distorted shapes by architect Daniel Libeskind, himself a child of the Holocaust. At Lindenstrasse 14, it is expected to open by November 1998. Signs of modern Jewish life in Munich include a 7,000-title Jewish bookstore, Literatur Zum Judentum, on Furstenstrasse (with branches in Berlin and Vienna). Not far from Munich is the site of the infamous Dachau concentration camp, with memorials, a famous sculpture by Nandor Glid and a museum that tells the harrowing story of the rise of the Nazis. Frankfurt has two Jewish museums: the Judishces Museum Rothschildpalais in a neo-classical palace once owned by the Rothschild family, and the Judengasse ("Jews' Street") Museum, built on the 500-year-old foundations of five narrow houses that were once part of Frankfurt's long-standing ghetto.
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