A temporary prayer house was established in 1946 at the community building at Grieskai 58. The building was renovated in 1969 and a new prayer house was established. A new ceremonial hall at the cemetery was built in 1989/91 by architects Ingrid and Jצrg Mayr.
In 1988, the year of the 50th anniversary of the Austrian Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938), all political parties of the city of Graz pledged to rebuild the synagogue as “an act against forgetting.” As Mayor Alfred Stingl said, “rebuilding the synagogue should not be viewed as “compensation,” since nothing can compensate for what happened to Austrian Jews during the Nazi period”.
October 21, 1998 the city council passed a unanimous resolution of all parties to rebuild the synagogue. The architects Mayr’s were chosen to build the new synagogue of Graz. The architects situated the building on top of the old foundation, incorporating portions of the ruins, which date from 1892.
The glass dome of the synagogue lets in light and the skycan be seen. The dome is supported by 12 columns – symbolizing the 12 tribes of Israel. A Star of David forms the center of the dome.
The architects’ assignment was to design a new building which would not be a simple reconstruction of the synagogue destroyed during the “Reichskristallnacht,” but instead would incorporate certain references to it.
The plan by the Mayrs fulfills this assignment by integrating the bricks from the original synagogue. After the architect had suggested using these bricks in construction of the new synagogue, they first had to be carefully removed from the garage building and cleaned of mortar. Approximately 40,000 bricks were needed for the synagogue wall.
More than 150 students from three public schools in Graz worked over 10,000 hours to gather bricks from the old synagogue, clean the stones, and select pieces for the new construction.
Thus the surrounding wall made from the old bricks signifies new life growing out of the old structure. The fact that the new building is smaller than the one destroyed in 1938 is also a symbol of the decimated post-war community. The synagogue was opened on 9 November 2000, 62 years after the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht).