The ensemble of buildings known today as the “Capitol” on the corner of Goethestrasse and Kaiserstrasse in Offenbach was built between 1913 and 1916 according to plans by the architects Fritz Schwarz and Karl Wagner as the new synagogue and community center of the Jewish community. The Great Synagogue on Goethestrasse was inaugurated on April 16, 1916. From 1919, Max Dienemann, one of the leading liberal rabbis of the Weimar Republic, worked here. The building with its approximately 30-meter-high reinforced concrete dome is considered typical of the neoclassical style, which is based on Greco-Roman antiquity, and is one of the few remaining "striking examples of the last heyday of synagogue construction in Germany" before National Socialism and the Shoah, as Dieter Bartetzko, the architecture editor of the FAZ, once put it. In the night of the pogrom from November 9th to 10th, 1938, the synagogue was desecrated and looted, but not destroyed. After the forced sale to the city of Offenbach, it came into the possession of a cinema operator. After the liberation from NS, the building was transferred to the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, which offered it to the newly established Jewish community, for which it was no longer usable. The community then handed the former synagogue over to the trusteeship of the city of Offenbach, which finally acquired the complex in 1954. The ensemble of buildings was used as a theater until the 1980s and converted into a musical theater in the 1990s; today it serves as a concert and event venue. (Source: Kulturelle Entdeckungen Südhessen, Darmstadt 2007; Calendar for the 100th anniversary of the synagogue in Goethestrasse, Offenbach 2016)