Munich opens Jewish Museum

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BERLIN, Mar 23 (Reuters) The southern German city of Munich, where Adolf Hitler founded the National Socialist party, opened a museum celebrating its Jewish heritage.

Built near the site of a synagogue destroyed by the Nazis in the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938, the museum aims to educate visitors about famous Jews from Munich where the community is only now back to its pre-Holocaust strength.

''The new Jewish Museum is a cause for celebration for Munich, which carries an incredibly heavy historical burden,'' the mayor of Munich, Christian Ude, told local radio yesterday.

Some 3,000 Jews were deported from Munich by Hitler's Nazi party during the final years of World War Two. They were sent to concentration camps in Lithuania, Poland and what is now the Czech Republic.

American troops taking the city in 1945 found less than 100 Jews left of the 9,000 living there in the 1930s. Today's Jewish community has been boosted by immigration from the former Soviet Union.

The new museum has been built in the same complex as a synagogue which opened last year.

''Munich's Jewish centre once again has a synagogue, and now also a museum,'' Ude said. ''I think that it will really make the Jewish community feel at home in this town.

''We hope Munich will be a town to which people will travel, when they want to engage with Jewish life.'' Munich hopes to emulate the success of Berlin's Jewish Museum which ranks amongst the capital's top attractions and has welcomed nearly 3.78 million visitors since it opened in 2001.

Several thousand Jews fled the Nazi purges in Munich to Britain, Palestine and the United States, including Henry Kissinger who went on to become US Secretary of State.

Kissinger features in a section of the museum's permanent exhibition, which is dedicated to famous members of southern Germany's Jewish community.

The museum also has a display of rarely-seen medieval Hebrew manuscripts, on loan from the Bavarian State Library.

''If we succeed in getting people to sit down and flick through a book after touring the museum, or buy a book in the museum shop, then I think we will have achieved a great deal,'' said the museum's director Bernhard Purin.

Anti-semitism and right-wing extremism are problems in Germany and a government study showed extreme right-wing crime rose significantly in the first eight months of last year.

The Dachau concentration camp, where tens of thousands died during World War Two, was located to the north of Munich.