History of the Jews in Hamburg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The history of Jews in Hamburg after today's municipal area includes Hamburg not only the municipalities in the historic city limits of Hamburg, but also the communities in the formerly independent cities Altona , Wandsbek and Harburg .

Since the end of the 16th century, Sephardic Jews who had been driven from the Iberian Peninsula or were persecuted there as conversos came to Hamburg . The Hamburg Sephardi came for the most part from Portugal and were mostly active in long-distance trade and profited from their connections with other Sephardic groups in Europe and America. A Sephardic community had also existed in Altona since 1712. The Hamburg community decreased in importance from 1697 due to emigration, but existed until the time of National Socialism .

Ashkenazi Jews (called “High German Jews” in Hamburg) were initially only allowed to settle in Hamburg as employees of the Sephardim. In 1648 they were expelled from the city and settled in Altona. But Ashkenazi soon returned to Hamburg. Jews have also been found in the other three cities since the beginning of the 17th century. Especially in Altona, the settlement conditions were very favorable due to privileges. The Altona and Wandsbeker congregations had branch congregations in Hamburg, whose members lived and worked in Hamburg, but still belonged to the other congregation.

In 1671 the Ashkenazi communities of Hamburg, Altona and Wandsbek merged to form a community network, the so-called "Dreigemeinde AHW". The chief rabbi of this association had his seat in Altona and also exercised jurisdiction over the Jews in Schleswig-Holstein . The association was dissolved in 1812 due to French legislation. At that time the Hamburg community was the largest in Germany with around 6300 members (around 6 percent of the city's population). During the French occupation of Hamburg , the Jews enjoyed almost all the same rights that were withdrawn from them after the Congress of Vienna . They only achieved final legal equality in Hamburg in 1861.

In 1925 there were around 20,000 Jews living in the Hamburg area (two percent of the city's population). Since the beginning of National Socialism , their rights have been restricted more and more. Most of the synagogues were destroyed in 1938 and the associated communities were soon expropriated. From 1941 until almost the end of the war, over 5,000 people were deported from Hamburg as Jews in the sense of National Socialism, most of them were murdered in the extermination camps . A total of around 8,000 Hamburg Jews were killed.

In 1945 the community was re-established by survivors of the Shoah . Since 1960 the community has had a newly built synagogue in the street "Hohe Weide" . After the immigration of Jews from states of the former Soviet Union , the community now has around 3,100 members.

The Sephardi

Since the end of the 16th century Hamburg was an important center of the Sephardi , expelled from Portugal and previously from Spain ( Alhambra Edict 1492) , even if it did not attain the importance of Amsterdam or London . The Hamburg Sephardi were mostly Portuguese-speaking. They came from both the mainland and Madeira Island . Portuguese was also their colloquial language, and many also spoke Ladino , Spanish and Hebrew .

The Sephardi were mostly active in branches of business with a higher capital investment, as wholesalers, financiers and bankers. They were also represented among the brokers ; H. they had the right to mediate commercial transactions. This profession was regulated by the state in the trading city of Hamburg and the number of brokers was limited. The Senate supported the settlement of the "Portuguese", as they were called, - often against the open resistance of the Lutheran clergy - for reasons of trade policy.

The High German communities - Hamburg, Altona, Wandsbek

The settlement of Ashkenazi Jews in the Hamburg area also began at the beginning of the 17th century. In contrast to the “Portuguese nation”, they were later referred to as “High German” Jews. Her mother tongue was mostly Yiddish , which was the most common language of the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe at the time. At first they did not have a community of their own and were legally worse off than the Sephardi.

In 1649 the German Jews were expelled from Hamburg, presumably as a result of anti-Semitic sermons by Protestant clergymen in Hamburg. They were accepted in Altona. The Portuguese Jews were exempt from expulsion because they had made themselves indispensable for economic life.

Since 1712, the High German Jews and the Sephardi had equal rights. However, only the Sephardi were authorized to provide brokers.

The Jews in Altona

Ashkenazi

In Altona, which belonged to the Danish part of Schleswig-Holstein and was administered from Copenhagen, the legal conditions for the Jews were better than in Hamburg. There they were not prevented from building a synagogue and burying their dead on their own land. According to Jewish ideas, the peace of the dead must be guaranteed for all time and must not be disturbed by the lifting of graves, so having a separate cemetery was an important prerequisite for the settlement of a Jewish community.

Altona Jewish cemetery

Around 1647 there were about 40 households in the Ashkenazi community; its members were not rich, but had "honest food". From the end of the 17th century until the 1930s, the Altona Jewish community set up a Sabbath border , the Altona Eruv . Traces of these so-called Jewish gates are still visible in the cityscape.

Sephardim

Since the beginning of the 17th century individual Sephardi settled in Altona. Here, as in Hamburg, they were initially counted among the Catholics before they openly professed their belief in Judaism. In contrast to the Ashkenazim, the Sephardi did not have to pay protection money, but instead had to buy citizenship individually. However, there were only a few families who moved from Hamburg to Altona, for example because they had a dispute with the community in Hamburg. A community was only founded in 1703.

The Jews in Wandsbek

Jews had lived in Wandsbek since 1604. In 1637 the tenant of the Wandsbek estate allowed the community to set up a burial site, which was used until 1886.

Main article: Jewish cemetery in Hamburg-Wandsbek

Enlightenment and reform movement

Lazarus Gumpel was one of the pioneers of the temple association and is immortalized in Heinrich Heine's works.

On his trip to Altona, Crown Prince Friedrich of Denmark not only visited the various Christian churches, but also the synagogues of the Sephardi and the High German Jews and took part in the prayer there.

Simultaneously with the emancipation of the Jews, a reform movement of Judaism based on the Jewish Enlightenment ( Haskala ) was formed , which triggered a religious renewal that still continues today, especially in North America. Israel Jacobson , court factor of Jérôme Bonaparte , was the first to establish a reform-oriented school synagogue in Seesen (and later in Kassel ) in 1810 . Reform -oriented religious instruction was given at the Israelite Free School in Hamburg's Neustadt district. As a result of the Reform Judaism movement, 65 Jewish housefathers founded the New Israelite Temple Association in Hamburg in December 1817, and in 1818 they built their first provisional church in the southern Neustadt. Among them were notables such as Meyer Israel Bresselau , Lazarus Gumpel and Ruben Daniel Warburg. This was the hour of birth of the Hamburg Temple Movement. The first temple was the first official German reform synagogue, where services were held with an organ, German sermons and mixed choir singing. This reform became externally visible with the adoption of a classical church design and an official costume for the rabbis that was similar to that of pastors. These reforms brought about acculturation of the Israelites in Hamburg.

The New Temple in Poolstrasse (1844–1931)

The New Temple in Poolstrasse was inaugurated in 1844 .

emancipation

The so-called Juden-Börse in Elbstrasse

The final emancipation of the Jews took place in 1849.

Main article: Jewish emancipation

Orientation to the Grindel

The synagogue at the Kohlhöfen in Hamburg from 1859

For a long time the Neustadt was the center of Jewish life in Hamburg. At the end of the 19th century, many Jews found the living environment in the old Jewish quarter of Neustadt to be cramped and too poor. The districts beyond the new Dammtor around the Grindelviertel became the preferred settlement destination for the Jewish population.

This new situation led to the construction of the New Dammtor Synagogue (1895, Beneckestraße 2-6, today on the campus of the University of Hamburg ) and the main synagogue on Bornplatz (1906, today Joseph-Carlebach- Platz). In the early 1930s, the Temple Association also relocated its synagogue. A new temple in the style of New Building was built in the 1920s on Oberstrasse in Harvestehude according to the plans of the architects Felix Ascher and Robert Friedmann , which was inaugurated in 1931. This new reform synagogue was used as a prayer house until 1938 and then had to be forcibly sold. Today there is the Rolf Liebermann Studio of the North German Broadcasting Corporation

→ see also: Center of Jewish Life in Hamburg

The community in Harburg

Harburg synagogue on the Elbe

A few Jewish families settled in Harburg, which was part of Hanover , at the beginning of the 17th century. The cemetery was probably laid out at the same time. It was devastated by French troops in 1813, so that it later had to be rebuilt. In 1857 a morgue was built. In 1862 the community built a synagogue on Eißendorfer Strasse. It was built in a style reminiscent of the Romanesque and equipped with a pulpit, the women's gallery was not separated by bars: both indicate a liberal attitude of the community. The congregation had about 175 members at that time, 30 of whom were paying dues. The cemetery and synagogue were devastated and desecrated during the Reichspogromnacht , the synagogue was later demolished.

Jews in Bergedorf

Very few Jews lived in Bergedorf . In 1695 a Jewish settlement application was rejected. In the 18th century, individual Jews settled in Bergedorf. In several mandates, peddling in the Vierlanden by Jews and foreigners was prohibited. Jews who lived in the village of Sande , which belonged to the Danish Reinbeck office , had probably also offered their goods in the two-city area. In 1814, the two-city administration allowed Hamburg and Lübeck to accept Jews, "because the Jews cannot be removed from the Danish sand." Nevertheless, not all who applied for a settlement were subsequently admitted. The number of Jewish citizens therefore remained small and there was no official community there . A private prayer room is occupied for 1838, the inventory of which was auctioned after the owner's death. In 1841 a small private cemetery for the Nathan family was established, which existed until 1938.

The relationship of the non-Jewish population to the Hamburg Jews

Since the arrival of the first Jews in Hamburg in the 16th century, the Protestant clergy have behaved in an anti-Semitic manner, presumably out of allegiance to Martin Luther , to whom anti-Semitic statements are ascribed (see Anti-Judaism in Modern Times # Luther's Position on Judaism ).

After the expulsion of the German Jews in 1649 (see above), they were only allowed to enter Hamburg with a valid passport that was valid for four weeks and cost one ducat. When the gate closed, the German Jews must have left the city.

Meanwhile, the Jews expelled from Hamburg enjoyed the rights of subjects in Altona due to a letter of protection from the Danish king from 1641, and since 1671 also in Wandsbek. However, the condition was an annual tax of 9,000 marks courant.

When Altona was threatened by the Swedes in the winter of 1657, several dozen German-Jewish families fled to Hamburg and were permanently accepted, although the hereditary citizenship tried to expel the Jews in 1674.

Until 1710, Jews in Hamburg were only allowed to work commercially as pawnbrokers, money changers, tobacco processors and gemstone dealers, as well as gold and silver lace makers. Craft trades were forbidden to them. The Jews were not permitted to own property or move freely within Hamburg.

From August 24th to 27th, 1730, anti-Jewish riots broke out in the Neustadt, which the clergy fanned by abuse of the pulpit. The city council had the incidents investigated. As a result of the investigation, the council reprimanded the preachers for their incitementary sermons and punished the ringleaders of the rioting.

In the year 1819 the anti-Semitic Hep-Hep riots broke out in many places in Germany , after the cry “Hep-hep, Jude verreck!” In 1819, 1830 and 1835 anti-Jewish riots flared up in Hamburg too, but these were suppressed by the police were.

Around 1835 Jews in Hamburg had no access to the guilds or the lawyers. “Jud” was a dirty word in Hamburg.

Only a few were excluded from discrimination against Jews, such as the highly respected banker Salomon Heine , who was accepted into the Patriotic Society as an honorary member in 1843 .

Hamburg's Jews had equal rights since the revolutionary year of 1848, when they were granted the right to vote. In 1849, Jewish craftsmen were eligible for guilds, and from 1851 Christian-Jewish mixed marriages were allowed, but this was only made possible in practice with the introduction of civil marriage (1861). The constitution of 1860 gave Jews full equality.

Time of National Socialism and Holocaust

Area "Grindel – Friedhof", Ohlsdorf Jewish Cemetery (Ilandkoppel)

Around 19,000 Jews lived in Hamburg until the Nazis came to power . In 1933, under the law to restore the civil service, many Jewish civil servants were dismissed from the Hamburg civil service; Through the “ First Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Law ”, all Jews who had remained in office up to that point were retired at the end of 1935. In 1935 the Hamburg Senate demanded that the Jewish cemetery on Grindel (Rentzelstrasse) be cleared. The bones of the dead and hundreds of gravestones were transferred to the Jewish cemetery in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf in 1937.

Contrary to the later testimony of Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann , almost all Hamburg synagogues were destroyed during the Reichspogromnacht in 1938 .

In Hamburg, Naftali Unger and the Hamburg shipowner Lucy Borchardt , owner of the Fairplay tugboat shipping company Richard Borchardt , created the possibility of a seafaring hachshara that trained young Jews in seafaring skills and thus enabled them to obtain an immigration certificate to Palestine .

Joseph-Carlebach-Platz

From October 1941 to February 1945, more than 5,000 Jews in Hamburg with 17 deportation trains in the Lodz ghetto , about the concentration camp Jungfernhof in the Riga ghetto , the ghetto Minsk , in the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Theresienstadt ghetto deported . So did Joseph Carlebach , acting Chief Rabbi of Hamburg from 1937 to 1941, who was deported to the Jungfernhof camp near Riga by the National Socialists on December 6, 1941 with his wife, three of his daughters and one of his sons . This part of the family was murdered except for Carlebach's son Salomon Peter (born August 17, 1925 in Hamburg, he has been called Shlomo Carlebach since after the war). In total, over 8,877 Hamburg Jews lost their lives as a result of persecution; This number also includes victims who initially fled to neighboring countries that were later occupied, as well as 319 people who committed suicide under the pressure of persecution.

Between 1941 and 1945, carpets, furniture and art objects from Jewish households, including Belgium and France, were auctioned in Hamburg. Survivors or heirs were later "compensated" with cash payments. 1500 Jewish companies were expropriated between 1933, and 2400 properties in Hamburg were "withdrawn" from their Jewish owners. The Reparation Office at the Hamburg Regional Court kept 27534 restitution files.

In the “Billwerder Ausschlag” district (today in Rothenburgsort) was the Bullenhuser Damm school , where the SS hanged twenty Jewish children together with their carers in April 1945. Cruel medical experiments had previously been carried out on children between the ages of five and twelve in Neuengamme concentration camp . The act - shortly before the occupation of Hamburg by British troops - was supposed to cover up this.

In Hamburg, only very few persecuted survivors underground. One of them was the family of the writer Ralph Giordano , who reports about this period in his novel “ The Bertinis ”. Other Jews survived in " mixed marriages " until 1945 .

Re-establishment of the community in 1945

In 1945 the Hamburg Jewish Community was re-established by some survivors of the Shoah.

Synagogue Hohe Weide in Eimsbüttel

In September 1960, a synagogue and community center was opened on the Hoheweide street in the Eimsbüttel district based on a design by the architects Karl Heinz Wongel and Klaus May . In addition to the prayer room, there is also a mikveh and rooms for community work. The synagogue is a listed building and is (as of 2012) in need of renovation. The congregation is oriented as a unified congregation orthodox , i. H. the services take place according to the Orthodox rite and the Jewish dietary laws are observed in the community center .

Talmud Torah School on the Grindel

Since 2004 the former Talmud Torah school has been used again by the community as a community center, elementary school and kindergarten, which had housed various state institutions since the expropriation in 1942. The center of Jewish life in the city has moved back to the Grindel.

In 2007 the community had around 3,100 members, the majority of whom came from the former Soviet Union .

Liberal Jewish Community

The Liberal Jewish Congregation Hamburg was founded in 2004; in 2013 it had around 360 members.

Stumbling block for Max Eichholz

Commemoration

→ Hamburg memorials for the victims of National Socialism

Since 2002 the idea of ​​the Stolpersteine ​​of the Cologne artist Gunter Demnig has been taken up in Hamburg . By 2016 he was able to lay over 5,000 stones in Hamburg.

On Edmund-Siemers-Allee, a green space by the loge house as the “Square of the Jewish Deportees” with a wall, memorial stone and inscription on a plaque commemorates the fate of the Jewish citizens.

research

The archives of the Jewish communities in Hamburg, which date back to 1641, came to the Hamburg State Archives in 1942. Based on a comparison made in 1959 with the Jewish Trust Corporation for Germany , half of the archive material is now in Hamburg and half in the Jewish Historical General Archives (today: Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People) in Jerusalem. The missing archive material is supplemented by microfilm copies .

The Institute for the History of German Jews in Hamburg deals with the evaluation of these archive holdings and publishes the book series “Hamburg Contributions to the History of German Jews”. The research center for contemporary history in Hamburg , which focuses on the 20th century, interviews people persecuted by National Socialism in its “Workshop of Remembrance” project.

The extensive literature is documented in the bibliography on the history of the Jews in Hamburg by Michael Studemund-Halévy .

See also

Publications

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Klessmann, Eckart: History of the City of Hamburg , Die Hanse / Sabine Groenewold Verlage, Hamburg 2002, p. 358
  2. ↑ Glückel p. 23
  3. ^ Gerhard Kaufmann (Ed.): Shadow. Jewish culture in Altona and Hamburg , p. 123
  4. ↑ Kellenbenz pp. 58–61
  5. ↑ Ursula Wamser / Wilfried Weinke [ed.]: A vanished world: Jewish life on the Grindel . Revised new edition Hamburg 2006. p. 66
  6. ^ Eberhard Kellers: Synagogue Community Harburg Wilhelmsburg . In: The Jewish Hamburg .
  7. ↑ Harald Richert: Jews in Bergedorf 1695-1945 in the journal of the Association for Hamburg History , Hamburg, 1985, p. 145 online
  8. ↑ Harald Richert: Juden in Bergedorf 1695–1945 p. 147
  9. ↑ Harald Richert: Juden in Bergedorf 1695–1945 , p. 148
  10. ↑ Klessmann, p. 359
  11. ↑ Klessmann, pp. 358f
  12. ↑ Klessmann, p. 360ff
  13. ↑ Klessmann, p. 388f
  14. ↑ Klessmann, p. 463ff
  15. ↑ Klessmann, p. 464f
  16. ↑ Klessmann, p. 466f
  17. ↑ Naftali Unger married Eva Warburg after the war , who then called herself Eva Warburg-Unger.
  18. ^ Ina Lorenz: Seefahrts-Hachschara in Hamburg (1935–1938) . Lucy Borchardt: "The only Jewish shipowner in the world". In: Hans Wilhelm Eckardt et al .: Preserving and reporting: Festschrift for Hans-Dieter Loose on his 60th birthday , Hamburg 1997. Internet at agora.sub.uni-hamburg.de
  19. ↑ He can therefore easily be confused with his cousin Shlomo Carlebach .
  20. ^ Linde Apel, Hamburg Authority for Culture, Sport, Media, in collaboration with the Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg and the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial (ed.): Sent to death - The deportations of Jews, Roma and Sinti from Hamburg, 1940 until 1945 . Metropol Verlag, Hamburg 2009, p. 110
  21. ↑ Beate Meyer (Ed.): The persecution and murder of Hamburg's Jews 1933-1945. Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-929728-85-0 , p. 47.
  22. ^ The Nazis expropriated 1,500 Jewish companies in Hamburg. In: "Hamburger Abendblatt", January 11, 2017, p. 9. Author abbreviation (nib).
  23. ^ Andreas Dey: First aid for the Jewish synagogue. In: Hamburger Abendblatt of August 13, 2012, p. 8
  24. ↑ Hamburger Abendblatt of June 21, 2007: http://www.abendblatt.de/daten/2007/06/21/759074.html
  25. ↑ davidstern.de
  26. ↑ Press release (PDF) of the Stolperstein Initiative Hamburg on the laying of the 5,000 Stolperstein on March 29; 2016, accessed June 6, 2016.
  27. ^ Paul Flamme, Peter Gabrielsson, Klaus-Joachim Lorenzen-Schmidt (eds.): Annotated overview of the holdings of the State Archives of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg . Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-923356-88-9 , fhh.hamburg.de
  28. ^ Michael Studemund-Halévy: Bibliography on the history of the Jews in Hamburg . Saur, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-598-11178-9 .
  29. ↑ See the review by Rolf Lamprecht : Unwanted, despised, murdered. A monumental research project examines the fate of Hamburg's Jews in the Nazi state . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 22, 2016, p. 15 ( online ).
  30. ↑ further articles; 1. von Studemund: A treasured legacy. Sephardic manuscrits and books from Altona and Hamburg, pp. 41-59; 2. as well as: Jorun Poettering: The economic activities of the portuguese jewish merchants in early 17th century Hamburg . Pp. 11-23; and Klaus Weber : The Hamburg separdic community in the context of the Atlantic economy , pp. 23-41