Munich Jewish Museum and community center open at St.-Jakobs-Platz

In 2007, a few months after the Ohel Jakob synagogue was consecrated in November 2006, two more buildings opened on St.-Jakobs-Platz in central Munich: the Jewish Museum and the Jewish Community Center. Together with the synagogue, they completed a three-part ensemble designed by the architects Rena Wandel-Hoefer and Wolfgang Lorch.

The community center, run by the Israelite Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, brought together a school, a kindergarten, a kosher restaurant, event rooms and administrative offices. The Jewish Museum, a city-run institution, presented the history and present of Jewish life in Munich through exhibitions open to all visitors.

The project mattered because it placed Jewish life in a prominent public space, close to Munich's main shopping streets and Marienplatz, the central square. The city had been the site of the Nazi movement's early rise, and its main synagogue had been destroyed in 1938. The new ensemble was widely seen as a sign of renewed confidence for the community, which had grown, not least through immigration from the former Soviet Union since the 1990s. It became a lasting centre of Jewish religious, cultural and educational life in Germany's third-largest city.