About this place
The New Synagogue of Dresden rises on the very ground where Gottfried Semper's celebrated 1840 synagogue once stood, until members of the SA set it ablaze during Kristallnacht on the ninth of November 1938 and the city's firefighters were forbidden to save it. Dedicated in 2001, exactly sixty three years after that fire, the new building by the architects Wandel Hoefer and Lorch is a stark, almost fortress-like cube whose upper layers rotate subtly so that the sacred space at its summit turns to face east. Its heavy stone shell recalls the ancient First Temple in Jerusalem, while a shimmering curtain of golden metal mesh hangs inside like a nomad's tent. At the entrance glows the single golden Star of David rescued from the burning roof in 1938, the only fragment of Semper's synagogue that still survives and the thread binding Dresden's Jewish community of the past to the one that chose to return.
Key facts
- 1840 year — Gottfried Semper completed the original synagogue on this site, one of the first grand synagogues in Germany
- 1938 year — The SA burned Semper's synagogue on Kristallnacht while firefighters were forbidden to extinguish the flames
- 2001 year — The New Synagogue was dedicated on the ninth of November, sixty three years to the day after the destruction
📍 Hasenberg 1, 01067, Dresden