Not far from the Alps and Italy, Munich is Germany’s most beautiful city, famous not only for the Oktoberfest but also for its elegance, high-fashion boutiques and a special mix of tradition and trend. This unique vibrancy applies to Jewish Munich as well. Visit the kosher grocery store run by DanEl or have a meal at Cohen’s, which annually wins Munich’s ‘best schnitzel’ award. Have a coffee at the trendy Schmock café with its excellent selection of Israeli food and wine and you will see that this special joie-de-vivre is shared by the Jews of Munich, too!
Munich boasts a host of famous citizens: the Nobel prize-winning author Thomas Mann, the modern abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, the Jewish conductor Bruno Walter, who was the Royal Bavarian Music Director in the 20th century, and author Lion Feuchtwanger, who cap-tured the complexities of the Jewish German identity better than any other writer. Feuchtwanger, indeed, predicted much of what became the terror of the Holocaust. Munich was Hitler’s power base. A golden streak on a city street marks a detour people took who did not want to salute the ‘shrine’ for Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. A memorial stands on the site of a missing synagogue with the following words in Hebrew: “Remember that the enemy scorned you.” It admonishes everyone to take on this double task: while enjoying the city, never forget its most difficult past.
Looking to a future full of hope and renewal, the Jewish community of Munich has just opened a spectacular new complex of institutions in the heart of the old city on St. Jacobs Square: a new synagogue, a new community center with kindergarten and a Jewish museum whose multi-media exhibit looks at the rich Jewish history as well as contemporary Jewish life. The Munich Jewish complex symbolizes a community which is experiencing one of the most dynamic changes in the country – a community returning to the heart of the city.
Tour Options
- Multiple-day tour program (Munich and countryside)
- Full-day driving tour of Jewish and general sites
- Half-day trip to the Dachau concentration camp memorial site
- 4-hourwalking tour (vehicle available on request) of Jewish sites
In our 4 hour walking tour you will visit the following sights with our guide:
- New Synagogue
- Jewish Museum
- New Jewish Community Center
- Former Synagogue Reichenbachstreet
- Menorah Monument marking where the city's main pre-war synagogue stood until 1938
- Heinrich Heine Plaque
- Holocaust Memorial at the site of the deportation of the Jews of Munich
- Ludwig Maximilians University, home of the anti-Nazi WHITE ROSE MOVEMENT
- DANELS kosher food store in the Viktualienmarkt
- LITERATUR HANDLUNG, Munich's Jewish bookstore
- And some places of interest to understand the development of the Nazi party in Munich