I was in the pews when Munich reopened the Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue—the city’s only surviving prewar synagogue—last month. It is an exquisite restoration and a bevy of politicians showed up. Germany’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, fighting back tears, promised to protect Jewish life; so did Bavaria’s Minister-President Markus Söder and Munich’s mayor Dieter Reiter. The celebrated pianist Igor Levit, who is Jewish, played Mendelssohn and Schubert and wiped away a tear of his own.

It was unmistakably a state occasion. The speeches were solemn, the security heavy and the messaging familiar: “Never again.” “We owe you this.” “Jewish life belongs here.“

Projects like saving the Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue politically legible: they are blueprints, permits, ribbon-cuttings and, a price tag you can print in a press release. They are also finite. What isn’t finite is the work of actually keeping Jewish life alive inside the walls the state has paid to refurbish.

The cost of renovating Jewish life in Germany is not cheap. The €14 million (roughly $16.5 million) project was paid for by the German government, the state of Bavaria and the city of Munich, with the non-profit association that led the rescue effort covering the remainder. It is admirable that so many actors came together to make this restoration possible. Yet recent history provides a few cautionary tales.

Particularly since the 1980s, numerous synagogues have been polished, though not necessarily brought back to life, with public funds. In Erfurt, Essen, Görlitz and Augsburg, architectural restoration has often stood in for restoring Jewish life.

Perhaps the strangest and most glaring example of this is Berlin’s Neue Synagoge, whose Moorish façade dazzles and gold dome glistens since 1995. However, the massive sanctuary—once the largest in Europe—was never rebuilt. Berlin’s Rykestrasse Synagogue, lovingly restored between 2004-2007 is a notable exception; it is currently Germany’s largest functioning Jewish house of worship, but its small community is dwarfed by the enormity of its interior.

Unlike a city like Görlitz (which has roughly 30 Jews), it makes good sense to foster new synagogues in Munich and Berlin, the cities with the highest Jewish populations in Germany, according to the Central Council of Jews in Germany. With sufficient support (including, naturally, engagement from Munich’s Jewish Community, which owns the building), the new Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue could become a revitalized spiritual home for Munich Jewry.

Designed by the Bauhaus-trained architect Gustav Meyerstein, the 550-seat Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue originally opened in Munich on Sept. 5, 1931. It was vandalized in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, patched up by survivors, and reopened in 1947 as Munich’s main synagogue—until the community moved in 2006 to Sankt Jakobs Platz, a nearby central square.

Its renovation is full of beautiful, resonant choices that display a painstaking attention to detail. The curtain for the ark that will house the Torah scrolls is woven from original fabrics by the Bauhaus textile master Gunta Stölzl—a gift from her grandson, Ariel Aloni, who flew in from New York to make the donation. The new stained-glass windows were fabricated by the Munich glassworks firm van Treeck, the same company that was contracted for the original windows back in 1931, according to Meyerstein’s designs.

Yet amid the talking points of German responsibility to safeguarding Jewish life, there was no credible plan presented for the building’s future.

Plenty of rabbis were present, yet none spoke. No prayers were recited. The evening was billed as a reopening, not a rededication of an active Jewish religious space. Rachel Salamander, a renowned German-Jewish literary scholar who spearheaded the shul’s rescue, made a point of saying that the Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue had been “restored as a house of worship—that is its primary purpose: to be a house of God.” But concrete details on when or how that might happen were not forthcoming.

When I asked around at the reception (where the food was provided by a non-kosher caterer), nobody could tell me who will be davening here regularly, what the prayer schedule is, or how the community intends to avoid turning this restored synagogue into yet another monument to Jewish life before the Holocaust.

A synagogue is not a “kulturelles Hotspot” (as Munich’s mayor bizarrely said he’d wished it would become) and Jewish life is not a series of German politicians wearing polyester-velvet kippot for the cameras. A flourishing shul is the outcome of operating budgets, clergy contracts and volunteer rosters. Jewish life means a space for prayer, study and conversation, and rabbis and scholars to facilitate it.

None of this is as telegenic as a chancellor’s tears. All of it costs money—the unglamorous kind that never ends. It is also bureaucratically irksome, and, in a country where antisemitic incidents nearly doubled in 2024, according to data compiled by the Federal Research and Information Point for Antisemitism, not without its challenges.

If the politicians who spoke so eloquently last month mean what they say about safeguarding Jewish life, they cannot stop at new pews, stained-glass and Bauhaus textiles. If “never again” is to be more than a rhetorical flourish, it has to be cashed out in regular prayer, in teaching, in the messy conviviality of a real congregation.

I have a selfish stake in all this: I live in the neighborhood. Sitting in the renewed sanctuary exactly a week before Rosh Hashanah, I imagined praying there; I imagined the awkward, happy collisions that define a living shul—the bar-mitzvah kiddush where the rugelach and schnaps runs out, the evenings when congregants in their holiday best cross paths with revelers in lederhosen and dirndls. (As Salamander pointed out, the Jewish High Holidays often coincide with Oktoberfest, as happened this year.)

If the Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue becomes a house of prayer again—regularly, reliably—then Merz’s tears will have meant something. If it doesn’t, then we have mounted yet another memorial to Jews where a shul ought to be.

The post Germany excels at restoring synagogues destroyed by the Nazis. But can they foster new Jewish life? appeared first on The Forward.

This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. There are 19 days to the election.

Numbers to know

• Shortly before the debate, a Fox News survey found Mamdani winning more than half of likely voters for the first time.

• The poll gave him 52% support among likely voters, trailed by 28% for Cuomo and 14% for Sliwa.

• The survey also looked at a small subgroup of Jewish registered voters. Among them, 42% favored Cuomo and a close proportion of 38% backed Mamdani, while 13% supported Sliwa.

• More New York City voters back Palestinians than Israelis, according to the poll. Most voters who side with Palestinians support Mamdani (70%) while those who support Israelis are divided among Cuomo (39%), Mamdani (28%) and Sliwa (23%).

Amy Schumer for Cuomo

• Jewish comic Amy Schumer shared her choice for mayor in an Instagram story yesterday — and it “rhymes with duomo.”

• Schumer has been vocal about her support for Israel during the Gaza war, though she did not say whether her vote had anything to do with Mamdani’s Israel views.

• She was among hundreds of entertainment leaders, including Jerry Seinfeld and Gal Gadot, who signed an open letter voicing support for Israel and condemning Hamas shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks. Some of her social media posts have been scrutinized by critics who said she conflated Gazans with Hamas.

• The comedian is a second cousin of Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic Senate minority leader who has declined to endorse anyone in the race.

Coming up

• On Oct. 21, you can listen to Cuomo’s interview with Logan Paul and Mike Majlak on the “Impaulsive” podcast. Paul, a controversial YouTuber and WWE wrestler who endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential election, claims Jewish ancestry.

• On Oct. 26, Mamdani will hold a rally together with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Forest Hills Stadium. They’re calling it “New York is Not For Sale.”

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The post Fox News poll shows Mamdani crossing 50% for the first time, but Cuomo has the edge with Jewish voters appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

A few years back, when nepo baby discourse was at its most heated, actor-director Ben Stiller emerged as an elder voice of reason.

“Untalented people don’t really last if they get a break because of who they are or know or are related to,” Stiller tweeted to The Black List founder Franklin Leonard, who was opining on “Let Me Go (The Right Way),” a short film whose creative team included the progeny of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King and Sean Penn. Access is access, Stiller conceded, but the children of celebrities face their own challenges.

If one needed further proof, they might look to an early pan of The Ben Stiller Show knocking him for his pedigree, among the many pieces of ephemera kept by Stiller’s father, Jerry. Or to the cassette tapes in which Jerry confronted his wife and comedy partner, Anne Meara, about her drinking, All of it was stored in a kind of archive at the Stillers’ apartment on Riverside Drive. Ben digs through those bankers boxes and scrapbooks in a new documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost.

The subtitle is a nod to a line from one of Meara’s plays, After-Play and an audio recording where Jerry tells his father, Willie, that a tape recorder would preserve his voice forever. Taken with Jerry’s packratting — he kept everything —  it’s named for a theme of L’dor V’dor. Nothing is lost from generation to generation. Talent may pass down, but so too do the mistakes our parents make.

It was, Ben admits, an inherited impulse that drove him to bring a camera to the family apartment after Jerry’s death in 2020, at the age of 92. Jerry was an inveterate home moviemaker with his Super-8, paving the way for his son’s ambition to direct. Shooting the home as he and his sister, actor Amy Stiller, prepared it for sale, Ben tells his parents’ love story while meditating on his own family life.

Letters to Anne from Jerry show an early marriage divided by the itinerant gigs of theater folk, a reality that was only resolved when Jerry decided they should form a comedy duo. Anne, wanting to be a serious actor, at first resisted, but the routines — which they’d improvise into a tape recorder — helped to launch their careers.

Their repeat appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show made them famous, and they solidified their act by drawing from their backgrounds, debuting the alter egos, the couple Hershey Horowitz and Mary Elizabeth Doyle. They did the Irish-Jewish thing years before Bridget Loves Bernie — and with an actual Jew, unlike the Irish Catholic irl David Birney. In their sketches they swap admiration over their respective culture — reduced to planting trees in Israel and Notre Dame football — though in reality Meara had converted to Judaism. (Sullivan, married to a Jewish gal, is said to have teared up.)

Ben follows in their footsteps at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, when he’s there as a guest on Colbert for directing Severance. Sullivan’s show was high stakes, he reflects, and his mother would handle the stress by drinking.

While Anne had an ease in her performance and flair for comedy, we learn that Jerry drilled his lines — he was both a perfectionist and perhaps a little less than a natural. While Anne got fulfillment from life outside of acting, Jerry needed to perform and to be loved, but was most devoted to Anne. When their careers became solo acts, their marriage grew stronger.

Ben considers his parents’ upbringing as a way to understand his own. Anne’s alcoholism is linked to unresolved trauma from her mother’s suicide; on a piece of writing Ben finds in the apartment, Anne describes how her mother “turned on the gas and inhaled eternity.”

Jerry’s working-class parents loved Jack Benny and George Burns, but didn’t support his ambition to become an actor. Anne thought it may have come from an urge to shield him from rejection. Willie’s thwarted desire to act is attested to in an interview Jerry taped with him, showing the project of this film isn’t exactly new for the family.

When it came to Ben and Amy, Jerry wanted them to find another path, for the same reason. (Jerry, as has been noted elsewhere, couldn’t have been more different as a father than Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza — he was the type to nurse Ben through a bad LSD trip or drive to his camp when he was homesick.)

The siblings recall their latchkey childhood, when their parents were on tour, and speaking to his own children Ben realizes he repeated this absence while making efforts not to. When he began working with his wife, actor Christine Taylor, he feared some of the same frictions his parents suffered would emerge, and when they were separated, he felt like a failure given their resilience.

In the process of making the film, during COVID, the couple reconciled.

Nothing is Lost is a tender tribute that finds its poetry in between generations. A match cut of a home movie of young Ben (Benjy) to one of his sons, Quin, shows symmetry right down to the same missing baby teeth. It’s graceful when tackling the tough question of the advantages Ben may have gained.

Ben said he wanted, in his early career, to distance himself from them. But as Taylor notes, he used one or both of his parents in just about all of his work.

“Because I wasn’t stupid, they were funny,” Stiller reasons.

It runs in the family.

Ben Stiller’s Stiller and Meara: Nothing is Lost is playing in select theaters Oct. 17. It debuts on Apple TV+ Oct. 24.

The post Ben Stiller wants you to meet his parents appeared first on The Forward.