The Galilee Church
The Protestant Galilee Church and the adjacent community center were built in 1909–1910 according to a design by the architects Georg Dinklage and Ernst Paulus in the narrow street of Rigaer Straße 9/10 in Berliner district Friedrichshain The historicizing Gothic style of the brick building, clad in red bricks, already hints at the beginning of modernity. After partial destruction in the Second World War The church was built under monument protection stands, restored.
Youth Resistance Museum
In 2008, the exhibition "Don't wait for better times - youth resistance in the GDR" was opened in the nave of the Galilee Church. It addressed the previously inadequately documented youth resistance and youth opposition in the GDR and has since coined the term "Youth Resistance Museum in the Galilee Church". Like several other Protestant churches in East Berlin in the 1980s until the fall of the Wall, the Galilee Church was a relatively safe refuge for dissidents and, for example, offered cultural freedom as a concert venue for young people who were in opposition to the GDR's political system. Even in post-reunification Berlin in the 1990s, it remained an important meeting point for the punk and squatter scene that had emerged in Friedrichshain, which is particularly thanks to the commitment of the parish priest Gerhard Cyrus and his wife, the parish assistant Christine Cyrus, who worked in the Galilee Church from 1976 to 1997.
The “Association for the Preservation and Promotion of the Youth Resistance Museum eV”
signed a long-term lease with the Galilee-Samariter Evangelical Parish in February 2024 to further develop the Galilee Church as a socio-cultural meeting place with the Youth Resistance Museum (the exhibition will reopen in the course of 2025) as the center. In conjunction with a regular cultural program and as an open space for the neighborhood in the Samariter neighborhood and beyond, the history of the Galilee Church is to be continued as a place that promotes social engagement and political participation and strengthens democratic, social and humanistic values.