Just opened in November 2001 is the new Dresden synagogue, along with the community center across from it (on the right). They had an evening of open doors while I was there, the weekend after it opened, where they explained the importance of the synagogue for the Jewish faith, and some history of the Dresden project. The city of Dresden paid a lot of money to help fund the building of this, something which caused some to wonder why the money wasn't going to the needs of citizens. Most, however, believed that though the holocaust is nearly sixty years in the past, the horror it caused is such that Germans should go out of their way to make amends. East Germany never accepted guilt for the holocaust since they said it was the "fascists" that did it, not good working class Germans. This means that since 1989 East Germans have had to confront their past the same way that West Germans had done. Germans have done it well. All German school children see the movie "Schindler's List," and have major time devoted to studying the evil of the holocaust, with the purpose that it never happen again. Most Germans believe it a German duty to stand up for human rights as a way to show the world what they learned from their own history. Although some neo-Nazi groups exist, the far right is weaker in Germany than most European countries, and has not gained a foothold they thought they would after the fall of communism.