Gustav Neustädter

Gustav Neustädter with his wife Paula in their wedding year 1920

Gustav Mordechai Neustädter (born September 27, 1892 in Sulzbürg, today part of Mühlhausen (Upper Palatinate) ; † unknown) was the last head of the Jewish community in Bad Kissingen and founder of the " Schochtimverband Bayern ".

Life

Stumbling block for the Jewish chief Gustav Neustädter

The three stumbling blocks for
Gustav Neustädter, wife Paula
and son Ernst David Neustädter

Neustädter was the son of the cattle dealer Jakob Neustädter (1849–1915) and his wife Jette (1866–?). After elementary school, he attended the preparatory institute in Höchberg for two years to prepare for teaching , took his exam in Regensburg in 1912 and then worked as a cultural officer and teacher for the Jewish religion in Cham (Upper Palatinate) . After the outbreak of World War I, Neustädter volunteered in October 1914 and served as a private in the 28th Infantry Regiment . For his combat mission with three wounds in 1915 ( Loretto battle ), 1916 ( Upper Alsace ) and 1917 (Putna, Romania ) he received the front fighter badge .

In 1920 he married Paula Bacharach, with whom he had three children. After the wedding, Neustädter worked in Adelsdorf and Maßbach , and finally since 1924 in Bad Kissingen. In the spa town he was a slaughterhouse , assistant cantor and teacher of the Jewish community. In May 1926 he called for the first time to found a "Schochtimverband Bayern" (Schächterverband), the general assembly of which he held on December 25, 1927 in Nuremberg and of which he also became chairman. At first the family lived at Spitalgasse 10, but then moved to the ground floor of the Jewish community center (today Promenadestrasse 2 ), which was next to the synagogue at the time. Neustädter was politically close to the conservative Bavarian People's Party (BVP).

When four Kissingen National Socialists ravaged the hut for the Jewish tabernacle festival in the synagogue's courtyard in October 1928 and the Bad Kissingen district court only imposed mild fines on the perpetrators, Neustädter demanded a harsher punishment from the Schweinfurt public prosecutor and was successful. In the 1930 appeal hearing, the fines were actually converted to prison terms. But in March 1933 the Kissingen National Socialists fought back: Neustädter's apartment was searched, his long-distance calls tapped, and a letter and telegram ban was imposed on him.

After Ludwig Steinberger's emigration, father of Jack Steinberger , who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics , Gustav Neustädter took over his position in 1938 as the first cantor and teacher. On the morning after the pogrom of 1938, he was arrested along with 27 other Kissingen Jews, but released after a few days of “ protective custody ”. While his sons Jakob and Siegfried immediately emigrated to America and Switzerland , his own efforts to leave the country were unsuccessful.

At the beginning of 1939 Neustädter became head of the Jewish community after the death of his long-term predecessor Nathan Bretzfelder. In this position, on April 26, 1939, he was forced to "sell" the ruins of the synagogue, which had burned out in the night of the pogrom, for a tenth of the original construction costs - around 16,000  Reichsmarks instead of 160,000 RM - with the parish hall and property at Maxstraße 10 to the city of Bad Kissingen. . He himself had to move to Hemmerichstrasse with his family.

Since the Jewish community now had no place for church services, Neustädter applied to the Kissingen authorities to be allowed to do this in a rented room on Hemmerichstrasse. Although the Gestapo in Würzburg had no concerns, the Bad Kissingen NS district leadership rejected this application. Neustädter then asked the Jewish religious administration in Würzburg for help, which actually had success with the Würzburg Gestapo in January 1940: The Bad Kissingen congregation, which had shrunk from 500 to just 50 members, was allowed to hold church services in the apartment. However, Neustädter was immediately forced in a board meeting in February 1940 to approve the decision to abolish the self-government of his Jewish community, subordinate it to the " Reich Association of Jews in Germany " and thus subject it to the arbitrariness and control of the Gestapo.

On April 24, 1942, Gustav Neustädter was deported to the Izbica ghetto near Lublin with his wife Paula and their youngest son Ernst . How and when he died there or in one of the nearby extermination camps cannot be determined. Gustav Neustädter, wife Paula and son Ernst were declared dead after the end of the Second World War, according to a decision of the Bad Kissingen district court. The date of death is December 31, 1945.

On January 22nd, 2010 the Cologne artist Gunter Demnig laid a stumbling block in front of the then and now Jewish community center (Promenadestrasse 2) in memory of Gustav Neustädter in Bad Kissingen .

literature

• Herbert Schultheis: Jews in Main Franconia. Würzburg 1980, p. 352 f.
• Wolfgang Kraus, Berndt Hamm and Meier Schwarz (eds.): More than stones ... Synagogue memorial volume Bavaria. Volume I. Kunstverlag Josef Fink, Lindenberg im Allgäu 2007, ISBN 978-3-89870-411-3 , p. 242

Web links

Commons : Gustav Neustädter  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Gustav Neustädter . In: Biografisches-Gedenkbuch-BK.de
• Gustav Neustädter . In: BadKissingen.de
• Gustav Neustädter . In: BLLV.de
• Gustav Neustädter . In: Bundesarchiv.de
• Gustav Neustädter . In: Biographical Database Jewish Lower Franconia
• Gustav Neustädter . In: Central database of the names of the Holocaust victims

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ingolstadt fellow citizens of the Jewish faith
2. ↑ Front operations from 1916 to 1917  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ Wounding from 1915 ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Central directory of digitized prints  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - It was not until 1930 that a superordinate Reichsverband was founded from four regional associations.  
5. ^ Allemannia Judaica, Bad Kissingen
6. ↑ Cornelia Binder, Michael Mence: Last traces. Last traces of German Jews in the Landkreis of Bad Kissingen , 1992, p. 112