the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Gliwice, which has 23 parish churches in the city. Gliwice is also the seat of the one of the three Armenian Church parishes in Poland (the other being in Warsaw and Gdańsk), which is subject to the Holy See directly. Other denominations present in the city include a Greek Catholic Church parish, an Evangelical Church of Augsburg Confession parish, a Methodist parish, 9 Jehovah Witnesses halls (including one offering English-language services), several evangelical churches, a Buddhist temple and a Jewish prayer house. Jews in Gliwice Gliwice's Jewish population reached its highest number in 1929 at approx. 2,200 people, and started to decline in the late 1930s, as NSDAP gained power in Germany. In 1933 there were 1,803 Jews in the city, and this number has dropped by half to 902 in 1939, most of them perished in the war. Between 1933 and 1937, Jews of Upper Silesia enjoyed somewhat less legal persecution compared to Jews in other parts of Germany, thanks to the Polish-German Treaty of Protection of Minorities' Rights in Upper Silesia. This regional exception was granted thanks to the Bernheim petition that Gliwice citizen Franz Bernheim filed against Nazi Germany in front of the League of Nations. Only 25 Jews of the pre-war population lived through the war in the city, all of them being in mixed marriages with gentiles. Immediately after the war, Gliwice became a congregation point for Jews saved from The Holocaust, with population at around a 1,000 people in 1945. Since then, the number of Jews in Gliwice has started to decline as survivors moved to larger cities or emigrated to Israel, United States and other western counties. Currently, Gliwice's Jewish community is estimated at around 25 people and is part of the Katowice Jewish Religious Community. Gliwice has one Jewish prayer house, where religious services are held every Sabbath and on holidays. It is located in the house that the Jewish Religious Community elected in 1905. Previously, Jews in Gliwice prayed in the New Synagogue which was destroyed by Nazis during the Kristallnacht in 1938. Notable members of the Jewish community in Gliwice include: Wilhelm Freund (1806–1894), philologist and director of the Jewish school Oscar Troplowitz (1863–1918), German pharmacist, owner of Beiersdorf AG and inventor of Nivea Creme Eugen Goldstein (1850–1930), German physicist, discoverer of anode rays, sometimes credited for the discovery of the proton