UNESCO Names Medieval Jewish Town Center in Germany as World Heritage Site
by Shiryn Ghermezian
The entrance to the Old Synagogue in the German city of Erfurt. Photo: Reuters/Martin Schutt
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has added the medieval Jewish town center of Erfurt in Germany to its World Heritage List.
The announcement, made on Sunday, means that the Erfurt center is now the second Jewish site in Germany to be protected by UNESCO in recent years. Germany now has 52 World Heritage Sites.
The town center includes three building: the Old Synagogue, a 13th century stone building; a traditional Jewish ritual bath, or mikveh, also from the 13th century; and the Stone House, which was built around 1200 and redesigned around 1250. These properties “illustrate the life of the local Jewish community and its coexistence with a Christian majority in Central Europe during the Middle Ages, between the end of the 11th and the mid-14th century,” according to UNESCO.
The Old Synagogue in Erfurt — the capital of the state of Thuringia — is the best-preserved Jewish prayer house in Central Europe, UNESCO added. Following a deadly pogrom in 1349 that wiped out the entire Jewish community in Erfurt and badly damaged the synagogue, the building was used as a storehouse and then, in later centuries, as a ballroom and restaurant. Its historical significance was only rediscovered in the late 1980s and it was bought by the city in 1998. In 2009, it was converted into a museum that focuses on the preservation of the culture and the history of Erfurt’s Jewish community in medieval times. The ritual bath is also now a museum.
“The Jewish monuments of Erfurt were nearly forgotten for centuries,” Maria Boehmer, president of the German UNESCO commission, told the AP news agency. “Their rediscovery is a great gift.”
Kerstin Puerschel, Germany’s ambassador to UNESCO, said in a statement that UNESCO’s inclusion of the Jewish sites in Erfurt to its World Heritage List “makes a further important contribution to making the common roots of Jews and Christians in Germany and Europe visible and preserving them for the future.”
