August 29 - November 29, 2010

The Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus is pleased to present Synagogues in Germany: A Virtual Reconstruction. The exhibition, featured for the first time in North America, opens August 29 and runs through November 29, 2010.

The 1994 arson attack on a synagogue in Lübeck, Germany motivated a number of students at the Darmstadt Technical University to explore an important chapter in the history of German architecture.  Using Computer Aided Design (CAD) to simulate true-to-life three-dimensional conceptions and spatial arrangements, they have virtually reconstructed synagogues that were targets of Nazi violence.  The reconstruction process is intended not only to create interest in valuable historical monuments, but also in architecture now lost.

These elaborate CAD reconstructions provide a representative survey of the architecture of synagogues in Germany before their destruction during Kristallnacht in November of 1938.  What is more, they convey visual impressions of the diversity, the splendor and the significance of the synagogue in the history of German urban architecture from the early nineteenth century until 1938.

The exhibition will display the reconstructions of 14 synagogues which, until the time of their destruction, were an integral part of the urban landscape of Cologne, Berlin, Darmstadt, Dortmund, Dresden, Frankfurt, Hanover, Kaiserslautern, Leipzig, Munich, Nuremberg and Plauen.  The exhibit also makes an important contribution to the development of new and contemporary forms of restoration.

This is an exhibition of the German Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa/Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) and the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

Learn more at www.synagogen.info.