Old Synagogue — A Community Rediscovered
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Transcript
Erfurt’s Old Synagogue contains building fabric from the late eleventh century, making it one of Europe’s most important surviving medieval synagogue buildings. Its survival was partly accidental. After the pogrom of 1349 destroyed the medieval Jewish community, the building was converted to secular uses. Later generations largely forgot what it had been.
That loss of memory helped spare it from deliberate destruction in the Nazi era. Rediscovered and researched in the late twentieth century, it now anchors a UNESCO World Heritage ensemble with the medieval mikveh and the Stone House. Inside, the Erfurt Treasure—coins, jewellery and goldsmith work hidden around the time of the 1349 violence—turns an architectural monument into something much more personal: evidence of lives interrupted, property concealed, and a community erased from the city for centuries.