Alte Synagoge (Leipzig)

The Old Synagogue in Leipzig, also known as the Great Community Synagogue or The Temple, was the city's most important Jewish house of worship. It was built between 1854 and 1855 in an Orientalizing style to designs by Otto Simonson and was ceremonially opened on September 10, 1855. The building stood on the corner of Gottschedstrasse and Zentralstrasse, directly west of the Promenadenring. During the November pogroms of 1938, the synagogue was set on fire and destroyed. The ruins were demolished in the spring of 1939 at the expense of the Israelite religious community, so today only memorials remain to recall the once magnificent building.

The synagogue's architecture was distinguished by a floor plan in the shape of a kite, visible from the street only at its eastern tip. Here, a semicircular apse containing the Torah ark projected outward, with the visible sides fanning out from it. The facade was divided into four bays, marked by horseshoe-shaped blind arches and paired windows. Inside, the building, a galleried basilica, had room for 1,600 worshippers. The furnishings drew on Indo-Islamic design elements, recognizable in the horseshoe arches, the stalactite motifs on the coffered ceiling, and patterns reminiscent of Spanish-Islamic architecture. An organ in the Moorish style, built by Friedrich Ladegast, completed the sacred space until it was destroyed in 1938.

Today, a memorial at the former site commemorates the destruction and the Jewish community. The building's floor plan is traced out over an area of twelve by twelve meters. At its center stand 140 empty bronze chairs, meant to symbolize the loss of the architectural shell. An exposed-concrete wall along the western boundary bears texts in German, English, and Hebrew on bronze plaques. Before that, the site had long been used as a parking lot and the location of a transformer station, until it was redesigned and dedicated as a memorial in 2001.