Jewish community in Leer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Places with Jewish communities in East Frisia, 1938

The Jewish community in Leer existed for a period of around 300 years from its beginnings in the 17th century to its end on October 23, 1941.

History of the Jewish community in Leer

16th century to 1933

The old Jewish cemetery in Leer.

Before 1933, Leer was a center of the German cattle trade and as a result a central place for the East Frisian Jews who were active in the cattle trade. It is no longer possible to determine exactly when the first Jews settled in Leer. What is certain is that the presence of Jews on the East Frisian peninsula cannot be proven for the entire Middle Ages.

The first evidence of Jewish life in Leer comes from the year 1611. The Jewish community goes back to the year 1650, when the required number of ten male worshipers for a minyan was reached. The early congregation still used rented synagogue rooms in Kirchstrasse and in the Wörde near Faldernstrasse for their services . In contrast to the other children of East Frisia, who, according to Countess Anna's police ordinance, had to attend school since 1545 , the children of Jewish parents were not required to attend school until 1803. Children from poor Jewish families received instruction in the Jewish doctrine and in the Hebrew language in the synagogue . The children of wealthy Jewish families received private tuition.

In contrast to the other Jewish communities in East Frisia, the Leeraner Jews were able to set up a cemetery soon after the community was founded . This was created in the middle of the 17th century and was located far outside the city limits near the blood court, the location of the gallows . This used to be located close to the Ledaufer on the ferry pier to Esklum . That is why the relevant part of the southern grass house was called "Galgenhöhe" or "Galgenvenne". It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that the name “Israeli cemetery” was introduced. The last funeral during the National Socialist period took place on June 11, 1939. After 1945, some returning Jews were buried in the cemetery after their death.

Around 1840/1850 a Jewish school was established in a building in Kirchstrasse. In 1909 the community built a school with a teacher's apartment on Deichstrasse (today Ubbo-Emmius-Strasse. 14). The Gallimarkt , which until the middle of the 19th century was a pure goods and cattle market, was of such great economic importance to Leer that it was impossible to relocate it for any reason other than religious reasons. While the Christian holidays had been taken into account since around 1820, this did not happen for the Jewish holidays until around 90 years later, in 1909, although the Jews provided a large proportion of the grocers and cattle dealers and these did not take place on the holidays. In August 1926 there were fights at the Leeran cattle market between students, who wore a large swastika openly on their jackets, and Leeran Jewish cattle dealers.

1933 to 1938

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the Jews in East Friesland suffered repression by state organs. First they were registered and the Gestapo checked the political views of some. Associations, organizations and events were also under observation with the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship . On March 28, 1933, Anton Bleeker, the Standartenführer for East Frisia, issued a ban on slaughter in all East Frisian slaughterhouses and ordered the slaughter knife to be burned.

This led to the first major incident on March 31, 1933, when the synagogue was surrounded by armed SA men. The SA forced the slaughter knife to be handed over and then burned in the marketplace. If anti-Semitism had remained an insignificant marginal phenomenon in East Friesland until 1933, it was now supported by the majority. The boycott calls by the National Socialists did not fail to achieve their goal. At the cattle market in Leer, the largest of its kind, part of the area was fenced off for Jews. This worsened the economic situation of the owners. One after the other had to give up and were thus Aryanized in a cold way .

November pogroms of 1938

Synagogue on Heisfelder Strasse (1885–1938)

On the night of November 9th to 10th, 1938, the rioting against the Jews, ordered by the Reich leadership of the National Socialists, took place in Leer, which were later referred to as "Reichskristallnacht" or November Pogroms 1938 . Erich Drescher , Mayor of the city of Leer, was called at home by the Oldenburg Gauleitung and briefly informed about the planned actions. Together with his nephew, who happened to be visiting, he was brought to the town hall by his driver Heino Frank, where he had a conversation with the standard leader Friedrich Meyer, which served to coordinate the areas of responsibility. Both were probably informed independently of the events that night.

After the conversation, Meyer went to Weener to pass the order on to the leader of the SA, Sturmbannführer Lahmeyer. Meanwhile, the SA gathered on the Uferplatz in Leer and marched on to the Lyceum on Gaswerkstrasse, today's Teletta-Groß-Gymnasium . There the men were divided into different groups to set fire to the synagogue and to “catch up” with the Jews. The synagogue on Heisfelder Strasse was set on fire using gasoline. Likewise, the apartment of the cantor and cantor Joseph Wolff should be "fumigated" ("We want to fumigate the wolf in his ravine" was interrogated by an SA man involved that night). The fire brigade present in Leer limited its activity under the eyes of Erich Drescher, as instructed, to the protection of neighboring houses (“This is not going to be extinguished, the thing has to go!” Drescher is said to have responded to the fire brigade's warning). Almost all Jews from the city and the district of Leer were rounded up and abused in the city cattle yard in Nesse. In the course of the morning the women, children and men unable to work were released, so that 56 men, along with around 200 other Jewish East Frisians, were transferred to Oldenburg. There they were rounded up in a barracks. Approx. 1,000 Jewish East Frisians, Oldenburgs and Bremen residents were then deported in a train to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, where they remained in the camps until December 1938 or early 1939. Little by little they were released.

Exodus, displacement and murder

After the synagogue was destroyed in 1938, the Jews who remained in Leer secretly held services in the upper rooms of Kampstrasse 37. The Jewish community in Leer quickly disbanded after the November pogroms. In the course of 1938 the Aryanization of Jewish properties was completed. In 1939 the city's Jews were forced to live in so-called “ Jewish houses ”, for example at Kampstrasse 37. Until 1939 the Jews were able to leave the country after paying an emigration tax.

At the end of January 1940, an initiative by East Frisian district administrators and the municipal authorities of the city of Emden led to an instruction from the Gestapo control center in Wilhelmshaven that Jews were to leave East Frisia by April 1, 1940. The East Frisian Jews had to look for other apartments within the German Reich (with the exception of Hamburg and the areas on the left bank of the Rhine). The Hirschberg family was the last Jewish family to leave Leer. Her house on the corner of Groninger Strasse and Kampstrasse was used as a ghetto in 1940 for the remaining Jews from the district. From here, the Jewish population remaining in Leer was sent to the extermination camps.

From 1943 onwards, a freight train from the Westerbork transit camp drove a large group of inmates via Assen , Groningen and the Nieuweschans border station to the "east" every Tuesday , mainly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor extermination camps . The trip took about three days. The train was supported by Dutch railway staff as far as Nieuweschans and taken over by German staff from there. In Leer, these trains usually stopped for two to three hours at platform 14 of the main station in the middle of the city. There they were guarded by SS men with machine guns.

post war period

During the Holocaust at least 236 Jews from Leer were murdered, three died by suicide and the fate of 61 remains unclear. 107 survived. They live all over the world.

At the beginning of the 1980s, one of the two federal boards that used to be placed above the entrance to the synagogue was found in an allotment garden in the city. It was brought to Israel through an initiative of the citizens of Leer, where it was attached to the Ichud-Schiwat-Zion synagogue on Ben-Jehuda-Strasse in Tel Aviv . In Leer there were criminal trials against various responsible persons from the district of Leer from 1948 to 1950, including Oldersumer. They ended with comparably mild judgments. Most of the imprisonment sentences imposed did not have to be started due to amnesty provisions. Many of those responsible were not prosecuted. Few surviving Jews returned to their hometown of Leer after 1945. Today they are part of the Oldenburg synagogue community .

On the site of the synagogue, a car repair shop was built in the 1960s, which remained until the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989/90). For a long time, the rumors about possibly still intact cellar vaults of the synagogue could not be investigated. In September 2019, the new owner of the area presented plans for the development of the fallow land. In the new building, according to the planner, an extension with a room of silence should point to the synagogue. The Archaeological Service of the East Frisian Landscape carried out an archaeological investigation prior to the new development. In the course of the investigations, she had two excavator cuts carried out on the site in June 2020. In the first cut, the archaeologists discovered the foundation of the northern outer wall of the synagogue at a depth of two meters, the exact location of which on the property has thus been clarified. The layer of fire from the fire from November 1938 and an approximately 50 cm thick layer of construction and fire rubble from the synagogue were found on the foundation floor. The second cut opened the entrance to the basement of the former rabbi's apartment. There three steps lead down to a reddish cement screed. According to the construction plans, this area is the entrance area to the boiler room and possibly also to the immersion bath. In order to document the last remains of the synagogue before it is finally destroyed, further archaeological investigations are to take place in coordination with the city of Leer and the building owners' association. The site will then be rebuilt.

Community development

The Jewish cemetery in Leer Loga

With 289 members, the Jewish community in Leer was the third largest in East Frisia.

year Parishioners
1802 175 people
1867 219 people
1885 306 people
1905 266 people
1925 289 people

Memorials

Memorial plaque in the Jewish cemetery.

A memorial for the destroyed synagogue on Heisfelder Straße has been located directly opposite the former location of the church since 2002. The site was fully financed by donations from the citizens of Leer. At the place of the old synagogue there is only a memorial plaque, as there is now a car repair shop on the property. So the rumors about possibly still intact cellar vaults of the synagogue could not be investigated.

Another memorial plaque can be found in the old Jewish cemetery on Groninger Strasse.

The former Jewish school in Leer has been a cultural and memorial site "on Jewish life then and now" since September 1, 2013.

See also

literature

  • Johannes Röskamp: On the history of the Jews in Leer . Leer 1985
  • Edzard Busemann-Disselhoff, Olaf Hennings: On the trail of former Jewish citizens in Leer. A city walk for young people aged 14 and over. Empty [approx. 2010].
  • Bernd Buttjer: Empty Jews in court. A dispute at the cattle market in Leer in 1926 . Leer 1985.
  • Herbert Reyer, Martin Tielke (ed.): Frisia Judaica. Contributions to the history of the Jews in East Frisia . Aurich 1988, ISBN 3-925365-40-0 .
  • The end of the Jews in East Frisia. Catalog for the exhibition of the East Frisian landscape on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Verlag Ostfriesische Landschaft, Aurich 1988, ISBN 3-925365-41-9 .
  • Daniel Fraenkel: Empty. In: Herbert Obenaus (Ed. In collaboration with David Bankier and Daniel Fraenkel): Historical manual of the Jewish communities in Lower Saxony and Bremen . Wallstein, Göttingen 2005; ISBN 3-89244-753-5 ; Pp. 942-957.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Website Stadt Leer: We want to smoke out the wolf in his canyon!
  2. ^ Archive pedagogical contact point of the city of Leer: Shoa . From the series: ApA teaching materials, accessed on April 29, 2011.
  3. ↑ We want to smoke the wolf in his canyon! . City of Leer. Retrieved August 24, 2012.
  4. ↑ Empty: The eyesore in the cityscape should go. Retrieved September 18, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Leer: Synagogue riddle could be solved. Retrieved September 18, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Press release of the East Frisian Landscape from June 11, 2020
  7. ^ Synagogue Memorial , accessed on April 21, 2016
  8. ^ Synagogues in Leer , accessed on April 21, 2016

Coordinates: 53 ° 14 '  N , 7 ° 26'  E