Germany's biggest synagogue reopened Friday after a major restoration, in a defiant symbol of the rebirth of Jewish life in the city where the Nazis planned the Holocaust.
A special ceremony was held at the century-old red-brick building in East Berlin which narrowly avoided being destroyed in the Kristallnacht - the night in 1938 when Adolf Hitler's followers torched Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship.
More than 1,000 guests including elderly Holocaust survivors confined to wheelchairs entered the synagogue past airport-style metal detectors and dozens of police officers, some with automatic weapons.
A few gasped as they saw the main sanctuary, pointing to lovingly repainted frescoes, restored stained glass windows and gleaming chandeliers. Leading the service was Rabbi Chaim Rozwaski, a native of Belarus who came to Berlin in 2000 as part of an influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union that still makes Germany one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the world.
He dedicated the reopening to the members of the Rykestrasse synagogue congregation who were murdered in the Holocaust. "As we remember the past, we must not forget all those from Rykestrasse who were killed in concentration camps, work camps, who died of hunger, gas or were shot," he said.
"They are here today in our minds and our souls." Berlin had a thriving, integrated Jewish community that counted 173,000 members in the 1920s. After World War II, the population numbered just 6,500.
Rabbi Leo Trepp, 94, who had preached at the synagogue in the 1930s after the Nazis came to power, called the reopening a "miracle". Trepp was among the guests at the inauguration ceremony in the restored building with political leaders and Holocaust survivors from around the world.
"It is a miracle that there are Jews in Germany again," Trepp told AFP. "And the synagogue on Rykestrasse, which survived two different regimes, is the symbol of that miracle." Built in 1904, the neo-Classical construction was closed for more than three years for the 4.5-million-euro (six-million-dollar) refit. Architects Ruth Golan and Kay Zareh used three surviving black-and-white photographs of the original building to recreate its remarkable elegance.
"It is now the most beautiful synagogue in Germany," the cultural affairs director of the Berlin's Jewish community, Peter Sauerbaum, said. The 1,200-capacity synagogue was one of the few Jewish institutions in Berlin to survive the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogrom of November 9, 1938. It was spared because it was located between "Aryan" apartment buildings which might have caught fire had the synagogue been torched.