From the ashes of the Holocaust, Jewish Munich was reborn. However, the dark shadows of the Holocaust continue to plague the city.
By Rachel Avraham
For Germans, Munich is like New York City. It is a beautiful city with many different parks, theaters and museums, as well as an elaborate metro system that Israelis living in the greater Tel Aviv area can only envy. However, the city was also the place in Germany where Nazism was born and the ghosts from the past continue to haunt the city.
According to my Jewish tour guide, it was from the pubs of Munich that Hitler rose to power. Today, in the same historic beer houses where Hitler used to deliver speeches, people still eat, drink and listen to music, as if Hitler did not call for the annihilation of European Jewry from the same beer houses in the past. Not even a plaque shows that from these same beer houses Hitler rose to power. While the people of Nuremberg hated Hitler, the people of Munich very much supported him.
For me as an Israeli, I felt sick to my stomach when I visited the Hofbrauhaus and saw Germans drinking their beer, laughing, eating and listening to a live band, without paying homage to what Hitler did from that very same pub. My guide tried to comfort me by telling me that the Hofbrauhaus was a historic beer house and it was Hitler who abused the place. She told me that sites that were built by the Nazis were either destroyed and buried under the rubble, or converted to car parks, toilettes, burgher kings, etc. But since the Hofbrauhaus was a historic beer house, that did not happen there. However, in my opinion, a plaque still needed to be put up recognizing what Hitler did there and that did not happen.
However, to their credit, the city of Munich did create a special monument in honor of Kurt Eisner, a German Jewish leader who was assassinated. They also created a monument in memory of one of the synagogues that Hitler destroyed and recently restored one of the synagogues that was destroyed by the Nazis. And today, Munich has a beautiful modern synagogue, a Jewish museum with a wonderful exhibit on the Holocaust, October 7th and transgenerational trauma, a Jewish school, a Jewish soccer team and several Jewish prayer rooms. From the ashes, Jewish Munich was reborn.
As an Israeli, I was touched to see that the German Jewish community placed an Israeli flag outside their synagogue together with flowers and candles. My guide told me it is in memory of the victims of the October 7th massacre. However, due to security concerns, their synagogue is only open on Shabbat; it was impossible to go inside the synagogue on a weekday.
Nevertheless, the remnants of the Holocaust still haunt Munich. The Jewish Quarter of Munich no longer exists. It was vanquished in the Holocaust, with the burning of the Reform Synagogue, the German Orthodox Synagogue and the partial burning of the Eastern European synagogue. My guide told me that the only reason why the Eastern European synagogue was partially burned and not burnt to the ground like the others is because it was located too close to other homes to be burnt to the ground without affecting the surroundings.
For this reason, the Nazis controlled that fire and only burnt the inside of the synagogue, not the whole building. For that reason, today that synagogue is now restored and is one of the few remaining historic synagogues in Germany. Yet still, two synagogues were wiped off the map, never again to be rebuilt.
According to the Jewish Museum, the Jewish community in Munich today is still haunted by the Holocaust. They claim that a tragedy of the magnitude that the Holocaust was, with the brutal massacre of six million Jews in the worst genocide in human history, does not only affect the elderly survivors, but also their children and even grandchildren. They had a special exhibit discussing how the Holocaust affected German Jews over the course of three generations. Indeed, although Jewish Munich was reborn after the Holocaust, the dark shadows caused by the Holocaust continue to haunt the city to date.
