To many it’s just another car park. For those with longer memories, however, that humdrum car park is a wound as raw and painful as the day of its creation. On June 9, 1938, Adolf Wagner, Bavaria’s Nazi leader, ordered the demolition of Munich’s main Hauptsynagogue on Herzog-Max-Strasse, a few hundred yards from the main city square, Marienplatz, in the old town.

It was a full five months before Kristallnacht — when synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany were looted, their windows smashed, their walls burnt to the ground — but then Munich always was Adolf Hitler’s “Capital of the Movement”.

Old photos show the Hauptsynagogue to have been a rather monumental, forbidding affair of piled-high Romanesque arches. But Hitler thought the synagogue an “eyesore”, yet more odious to him for being politically liberal. It took about a week for the country’s third largest synagogue to be erased from the city fabric. It was, said Wagner, to be replaced by a car park. Not even the foundations were to remain.

Perhaps that explains why its replacement is so, well, monumental. Almost 69 years after its predecessor’s removal, Munich’s main Ohel Jakob synagogue — the largest Jewish construction project in Europe — opened fully to the public last month. There’s no missing it: three giant slabs of creamy travertine stone, one housing the synagogue, one a Jewish museum, the third a community centre, their sharply modernist, abstract forms an attention-grabbing foil to the twee gothic pinnacles and steep pitched roofs of the Alt-stadt. Here I am, they say, here to stay. You just try shifting us this time.

In the decades after the Second World War the city’s residual Jewish population worshipped outside the city centre in small shtibls in the suburbs. The new synagogue was to unite these disparate communities in one — the more pressing because of the explosion of the city’s Jewish population since the Berlin Wall came down. Germany’s Jewish community is the fastest growing in the world, conservatively estimated at 100,000 by the World Jewish Congress. Munich’s itself has risen from a few dozen in 1945 to more than 9,000.

Just as Hitler’s erasure of the Jewish community’s built fabric was a precursor to their erasure from society, so this very visible return of the community to Munich’s streets is meant as a powerful symbol of its rebirth, what Jewish community leaders have called their “normalisation”, integrated as a normal part of city life and, now, the cityscape.

The architecture therefore has to perform a balancing trick. It has to be traditionally Jewish in symbolism, but a break from the past. It has to celebrate a community, but also foster its openness to the wider community.

The architects firm Wandel Hoefer Lorch has performed this balancing act before. Their replacement for Gottfried Semper’s main synagogue in Dresden, also destroyed in 1938, opened in 2001, the first to be built in Eastern Germany since 1945. To square the symbolic circle of openness and security, memorialising Jewish permanence and Jewish mobility, its history of exile and nomadism and its desire to memorialise the community’s endurance in stone, Wolfgang Lorch came up with the conceit of the temple and the tent.

The exterior is a plain, windowless stone cube, one corner twisted — the “temple” — its solemn, monumental plainness in one bold architectural swoop both memorialising the absence, the silence inherent in Jewish history and the community’s restored presence. Within, a gridded “tent” structure woven from copper and brass, oak and cedar hangs from the ceiling, like a cloak worn inside the body, diffracting light from the central rooflight.

It’s a concept repeated, but improved, in Munich. There is the same knowing monumentality — huge, travertine stone walls, windowless to the street, the blocks left rough hewn on the synagogue to accentuate their massiveness. Its architecture seems eternal — and forbidding — but it is rhetoric, like the warning plumage birds, insects and animals wear to ward off predators. Emerging from the hefty stone “temple” is an open, light, lacy “tent” far more architecturally dominant than in Dresden: fragility emerging from stability.

Inside the plain decoration in stone and Lebanese cedar, the simple geometry of the “tent” and the beautiful light combine to create the sense of transcendance vital in any place of God. At night, when the “tent” glows, it seems alive.

The architects elected not to house the synagogue, museum and community centre in one domineering structure, but to break them up. This is no isolated monument, overladen with tricksy symbols like so many memorials, but a “normal” working part of Munich.

These are clever, simple, subtle architectural linguistics, one stone killing many birds, the more so considering the essential religious traditions that have to be first given form by this nonJewish architectural practice before you even start on place-making and beauty.

A synagogue doesn’t ram symbolism down its congregation’s throats. Synagogue architecture is richly eclectic, encompassing the Germanic Romanesque of the old Hauptsynagogue and this modish abstraction of the new.

There are, though, some strict basic rules: archetypical analogies, such as the temple and the tent; matters of ritual and custom — such as the mikveh , a bath for ritual purity, which can’t be filled by water pumped or carried, but rather by rainwater collected on the roof, then carried to the bath in the basement via the “tent’s” four corner pillars; there is symbolism, but it is subtle — the triangles of the tent’s structure nodding, say, to the Star of David.

It’s a masterly work. But it has its work cut out. In 2003, Bavarian police foiled a neo-Nazi plot to bomb the synagogue’s construction site. During the dedication, 1,500 police and metal-detecting gates formed a necessary security cordon, mournfully undermining the project’s very ambitions. Hitler may be long dead, but the politics of hatred enshrined in Nazism remain as charged as ever.

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