Institutionalized Experiment: The Politics of "Jewish Architecture" in Germany

The eruv, both as a concept and as a pragmatic tool within everyday Jewish life, can be seen as the typical architectonic and urbanistic response to the condition of diaspora. Germany represents perhaps the diasporic condition par excellence. One would therefore expect the installment of eruvin to be a recurring feature of urban life. However, no eruv currently exists in Germany, and the physical presence of Jewry in that country follows an ideology that is, surprisingly, opposed to that of the eruv, a presence that can be described as anti-eruv and maybe anti-diasporic.

Abstracted from its religious context and analyzed in terms of its urban strategy, the eruv stands for the creation of a specific urban realm that nevertheless remains accessible to all groups of society and open to all uses. Two main characteristics of the eruv with respect to its urban methodology are the addition of multiple layers of meaning to the urban realm and a strategic approach of many small-scale interventions to affect a large area. Illustrating these characteristics, the recently installed eruv in Northwest London required only the construction of approximately 30 poles connected by nylon wire to complete the enclosure of an area of six and a half square miles.¹ The measurements of these fixtures, conceived of as gates by the rabbis, as defined in the talmudic Tractate Eruvin, are described in reference to the Jerusalem Temple, specifically its gates leading to the ulam (entrance hall) and the hekhal (the holy place).² One of the main highways, for example, becomes part of that eruv boundary, and for one day of the week it symbolizes the wall of the Jerusalem temple for Orthodox Jews.

The liveliness of a city segment and the changes in the activities carried out within that urban realm do not depend on a single, visible, and centralized intervention or building but on many small-scale changes, declarations, and shifts of signification that are only noticeable to the informed and do not affect the unacquainted. The eruv can be described as containing a minimum of "Jewishness" in a maximum of space. I argue that the physical presence of German Jewry follows exactly the opposite strategy, that it represents a model of an "anti-eruv," and that this model has a specific political relevance for the architects, for the Jewish communities, and for the political establishment.

Despite the danger of oversimplification, we may say that the Talmud in general and the eruv in particular represent methods of collective memory and the means to construct a collective identity (as argued by Charlotte Fonrobert in her article in this issue). They were developed as responses to the catastrophe of the destruction of the Temple and the Diaspora that followed. The eruv is a tool to project a vision of ancient Jerusalem and its Temple onto the banality and the mundane of the everyday city and to give a people, who were spread out all over the world, a sense of unity and identity without sharing a central physical place. In other words, it is a tool to cope with the separation of nation (identity and culture) from polis (location and common space). If the approach currently followed in contemporary Germany is contrary to that of the eruv, then the question of its collective reception and, hence, its political consequences should also be noticeably different.

When the city government of Munich started developing a concept for a new Jewish community center in 1999, it invited scholars from all over the world to help formulate the program and guidelines for this daunting task. Regardless of the multiple voices that were heard (mine, among them), a general strategy had been laid out from the beginning. The Jewish community center was to occupy one of the few remaining open squares in the city center, close to the major shopping areas. The community center was to contain a synagogue, a Jewish elementary school, a Jewish school with evening courses for the general public, a multipurpose hall, and connected spaces for community activities (a Jewish museum, a Jewish restaurant, a Jewish café, and...