History of the Jews in Stralsund
The history of the Jews in Stralsund begins in the 13th century.
Jews came to the Baltic Sea from the west during the German colonization in the east , but were largely expelled from Stralsund around 1500 . Only in the 18th century Jews settled in the city again. The Stralsund Jewish community comprised up to 170 members. Among them were members of the Wertheim and Tietz families , whose department store groups Wertheim and Kaufhof had their origins in Stralsund. After the last Jews from Stralsund in northern Germany were deported to the extermination camps in 1943, an attempt to rebuild a Jewish community in 1947 failed.
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Settlement in the 13th century
The first Jews also settled here with the German immigrants from western regions who came to the Baltic Sea coast , which was still predominantly Slavic, in the 13th century . In Stralsund, which was endowed with the town charter in 1234, they did not live in a ghetto on the outskirts, but in an area in what was then Neustadt ; In 1401 the street was first mentioned in a document as Judenstraße . In the oldest surviving town book in Stralsund, Jews are named in connection with the purchase of land in 1282 and 1286.
The Stralsund Jews were probably well off socially. Among other things, they operated junk trading and worked as pawnbrokers . In a confession made by knights and miners on August 17, 1316 that they owed the city of Stralsund 8,000 marks, they undertook to repay them in five installments in cash or “by depositing with the Jews”. A similar confession from 1319 also mentions Jews as pawnbrokers.
Protection and eviction
While the acquisition of citizenship by Jews in the Pomeranian cities of Stettin and building permits for houses in Greifswald has been proven, no such proof can be found for Stralsund. However, the Jews were considered resident in Greifswald as well as in Stralsund . They enjoyed the protection of the sovereign from the Rügen Princely House. Hostilities against Jews are not evident at this time. Even when the Jews in large parts of Germany were held responsible for the outbreak of the plague , persecuted and killed in the middle of the 14th century , the Stralsund Jews remained safe: Chronicles that describe the rulership of the plague contain no references Pogroms in Stralsund.
In a document available in the Stralsund city archives , the mayor and council of the city of Pasewalk asked Stralsund mayor Matthias Darne in 1466 for the protection of a Moses and another Jew; in the event of a violation they would be induced to call the sovereign.
In 1481 the sovereign granted the Pomeranian Jews a six-year privilege . In it the Duke places the Jews under his express protection; the rights and duties of the Jews are mentioned. After that they were able to “take deposits day and night” in the Pomeranian cities and sell their goods, and they were also allowed to practice their ritual customs.
After the Sternberg host-molester trial of 1492 and the subsequent pogrom against the Jews , a violent anti-Semitic mood spread throughout northern Germany , which apparently also affected Stralsund. The Jews were expelled from northern Germany. Few stayed and were baptized. A letter from the Pomeranian Duke Ernst Ludwig from 1571, in which he instructs the Stralsund council to condemn an Asmus Wegener very mildly for the manslaughter of a Jew , shows that this procedure was unsafe.
Up until the 18th century, nothing more can be found in the chronicles about Jews in Stralsund. Apparently they had been completely evicted.
New Jewish community in Swedish Pomerania from the 18th century
In the 18th century the chronicles again name Jewish residents in Stralsund. These traders were tolerated as "war suppliers", but were subject to numerous restrictions in life and trade and were also always threatened with expulsion. Joseph Well, originally from Prague , a brandy distiller with numerous references, came to Stralsund in 1708. He requested baptism and changed his name to Carl Friedrich Christmann. However, he soon went back to the synagogue and asked to be baptized again, after which he was sent to prison. There, his overseer attested that he was an extremely correct Christian, but when he was released from prison on May 17, 1709, he was chastised by the executioner with 30 lashes and expelled from the city forever.
Other Jews, who were active as traders and specialists in gold and silver processing, were also seen by local merchants as competitors and were severely disadvantaged. In 1710 the Jews were named in a train with equally unpleasant beggars and gypsies , who were to be branded and expelled. The Jews were forbidden to practice a craft or to trade in wool , hides , flax , honey and other goods.
In 1757, a royal mint ("coin") was set up in Stralsund . The directors of the mint asked the Swedish government for permission to employ "Israelites" who they needed to procure the precious metals , buy old coins and cut dies. The government in Stockholm was not exactly considered to be friendly to Jews, but at the request of the directors the “coin Jews” received not only an employment permit but also a letter of protection. Despite objections from the local population and the provincial estates, who wrote to reminders that state legislation prohibits Jews from staying in the state, twelve Jews were allowed to settle in Stralsund. This can be seen as the “hour of birth” of the Jewish community in Stralsund.
The twelve “coin Jews” were followed by others, so that the community had 37 members in 1765, 50–60 in 1770, 119 in 1784 and 170 in 1800. This made Stralsund the city in Western Pomerania with the highest number of Jewish residents. The first mentioned church leaders in 1774 were Nathan Abraham and Abraham Hertz. On March 30, 1787, the Jews opened their synagogue in Stralsund.
The Stralsund Jews could now also buy houses individually. A certain prosperity was possible for some of them; a statistic from 1797 names the employment of maids in seven of 30 licensed Jewish families. However, the Jews continued to face constant discrimination . Particularly when trying to create new economic structures, the Jewish entrepreneurs faced a negative attitude on the part of the locals, who were caught up in tradition. After a few years, Samuel Hertz had to give up his wool factory, which was established in 1778, because garment tailors , cloth makers, Raschmakers and the city council hindered him as much as possible.
Even the establishment of a Jewish cemetery (Hebrew בית עלמין " Beth Olamin ", "House of Eternity") was refused to them for a long time. The dead had to be buried in Sülze and Ribnitz in Mecklenburg ; the arduous and long way there made it impossible to bury the dead as ritually prescribed on the following day. In 1776 the Jewish community asked "a noble, well-born councilor" to provide a burial place, but the council replied that nothing could be removed from the fields and pastures in front of the city. Finally, the founder of the Stralsund faience manufactory , Joachim Ulrich Giese , offered the Jews his property in Niederhof as a burial place in 1776 , even without an official license. The Hertz family was the first to bury a relative (their daughter) here. At least 50 Jews were buried here until the middle of the 19th century.
The chronicler and reformer Johann David von Reichenbach described the situation of the Jewish townspeople in 1784 in his “Patriotic Additions to the Knowledge and Admission of Swedish Pomerania” as follows: “For the sake of the coin and the army, some Jews were drawn into the country during the last war. They couldn’t be unusual for us, because they were already here in the 13th century, and more numerous than in the past. In the meantime, no sooner was there peace than one no longer needed her: one looked at her with curious eyes and would have liked to break the stick over her. Because they didn't even find a burial place here near the city, and they would have had to give their corpses to the birds if the philanthropic councilor Giese hadn't given them a territory from his Gut Niederhof. "
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Prussian period from 1815
Through the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Western Pomerania and Stralsund became part of Prussia . Even under the new rule, the Jews were prohibited from settling or trading here. However, Jews who appeared “useful” were tolerated in limited numbers.
In 1850 the Jewish community was able to acquire a piece of arable land on Greifswalder Chaussee , which from then on served as a second cemetery.
In the second half of the 19th century, Jewish merchants in Stralsund soon broke into the German and foreign markets with their companies. On April 15, 1852, Abraham Wertheim and Theodor Wertheim opened a "Manufactur-Modewaren-Store" in Wasserstraße , which formed the basis for the Wertheim Group . Abraham and Ida Wertheim's first Wertheim department store was established in 1875, and in 1876 the sons of Abraham Wertheim, Georg and Hugo, joined the business, expanded the product range and had a right of exchange, uniform prices and the possibility of extensively buying the goods to look at, a. In 1902, the Wertheims in Stralsund bought the properties at Ossenreyerstrasse No. 8-10 and built a large department store there, which opened in 1903. In 1927 the neighboring properties at Ossenreyerstrasse 11 and 12 were also acquired. On August 14, 1879, Leonhard Tietz took over a small yarn, button, trimmings and woolen goods business, thereby laying the foundation for the Kaufhof Group .
Weimar Republic and National Socialism
Even before April 1, 1933, the “Pommersche Zeitung” had repeatedly called for the boycott of Jewish businesses planned by the National Socialists for that day . However, only a few people from Stralsund took part in this boycott. At that time, 134 people from Stralsund (80 men and 54 women) declared themselves to be Judaism. At least 95 of them left the city by 1939; in the 1939 census - now according to the National Socialist definition - 62 Jews were counted.
In 1934, the city administration renamed Judenstrasse to Jodestrasse on the initiative of the local NSDAP group located here . After the wedding of Heinz Cohn, a Jew from Stralsund, with Luice Genzen, who was considered Aryan, SA men moved up in front of the Cohns house at 72 Frankenstrasse and disrupted the celebration; Cohn was taken into protective custody, as was David Mandelbaum, who was also married to an "Aryan". The “Pommersche Zeitung” reported on it the following day under the heading “Subsequent wedding serenade / The excitement of the national comrades is venting” and concluded with the words that the Jews did not belong in front of a registry office, “but somewhere completely different”.
On October 15, 1938, there were still 20 shops owned by Jews in Stralsund; the four Jews of Polish nationality had to close their shops on October 28, 1938 and were expelled from the Poland campaign along with their 18 relatives . On May 11, 1939, Lord Mayor Werner Stoll reported to the Gauleiter Schwede-Coburg in Stettin that the "liquidation" of the Jewish operations had ended. A foundation founded by the merchant Moses Lazarus Israel, which had awarded scholarships to young men regardless of their creed, was merged with a foundation close to the National Socialists on November 7, 1939, and Jews were expressly excluded from benefiting from the foundation.
On November 9, 1939, members of the SS were sworn in on the Alter Markt . A ceremony to commemorate the Hitler putsch in November 1923 had previously been held in the Stralsund Theater . On the night of November 10, 1938, the Reichspogromnacht , SA and SS men destroyed Jewish shops and apartments and set the synagogue on fire. The "Stralsunder Tageblatt" wrote under the heading "Anti-Jewish rally in Stralsund":
- “As in other places in the province, there were spontaneous rallies against the Jews in Stralsund yesterday. […] At around 5 a.m., fire broke out in the synagogue on Langenstrasse. [...] The windows of various Jewish shops were smashed. There was no looting or assault. In yesterday evening, crowds of people formed again in various parts of the city, and there were renewed demonstrations in front of the Jewish shops. During the day around 30 Jews were taken into protective custody for their safety, but some of them have already been released. "
In fact, the stores had very well been looted. 20 of the Jews taken into protective custody were taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , where they stayed for between two and five weeks. On November 11th, the NSDAP organized a mass rally on the Alter Markt, at which the district leader of the NSDAP Beyer spoke about " World Jewry and its red and black friends". The “Pommersche Zeitung” printed the speech and commented on the pogrom night:
- “Even if a large part of the people knew what it was about, it is also certain that even today very many still do not want to understand that the Jew with all his followers is the cancer damage of a people. Unfortunately, yesterday and the day before yesterday in Stralsund we had to experience that local residents were protecting this rabble. It is unworthy of a German to stand in front of a Jew. "
Simon Lemke, cantor of the synagogue community, handed over a list of 74 names of Stralsund citizens of Jewish faith on November 29, 1939. The list supplemented by the National Socialists to include citizens who were considered to be Jewish under the racial laws formed the basis of the list for the later deportations . On the basis of a secret authorization from Hitler in October 1939, five Jews from Stralsund, who were previously in the state hospital (today Hospital West ), were murdered as part of the so-called euthanasia .
The Jews who lived further were persecuted ever more severely. Long before the nationwide deportation of German Jews began in October 1941, Reinhard Heydrich declared in a meeting on January 30, 1940 that he wanted to vacate the apartments of Jews in Pomerania for ethnic Germans from the Baltic States for “reasons of the war economy”. A transport of Pomeranian Jews to the Lublin ghetto put together in early 1940 also included at least 36 Stralsunders (33 adults and three children) who were arrested on the night of February 12th and 13th, 1940 and brought to Stettin. Of the 20 business owners registered in October 1938, only two lived in Stralsund on April 29, 1941, only nine other names of Jewish residents are recorded. The five male Jews were committed to forced labor. In autumn 1943 they were taken to Auschwitz together with the Dorn family (Edmund, Herta and their daughter Eva) . Except for one, the tailor Israel Kotljarski, everyone died there, including the former manager of Leonhard Tietz's department store, Isidor Lewkowitz. Only Kotljarski returned to Stralsund, the other survivor, Flora Manthel, moved away.
After the Second World War
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On September 2, 1947, with the consent of the vice-president of the state government, Gottfried Grünberg , 22 Jews gathered in Stralsund to form a new community for the districts of Stralsund, Rügen , Usedom , Grimmen , Demmin , Greifswald , Anklam , Ückermünde and Randow , based in Stralsund to found. However, since no ten male Jews were present, this project failed.
Stralsund synagogue
On March 30, 1787, the Jews opened their synagogue at Langenstrasse 69, the construction of which had started the previous year. It offered space for two hundred people and had a mikveh . Jews all over Swedish Pomerania helped finance the construction of the synagogue.
In 1913 the synagogue was completely rebuilt. At the inauguration on September 16, 1913, Mayor Ernst Gronow wished “that our Jewish fellow citizens may live in this city with their Christian fellow citizens in peace and harmony”.
On the night of November 10, 1938, SA and SS men destroyed Jewish shops and apartments and set fire to the synagogue, which was partially destroyed. The city council bought it for 12,000 Reichsmarks and handed it over to the technical emergency aid for use as a service and accommodation building. During the bombing raid on Stralsund on October 6, 1944 , the building was badly damaged and never rebuilt. The ruin was demolished in 1951.
On April 28, 2009, in the presence of Chancellor Angela Merkel and the regional rabbi William Wolff, a memorial plaque was attached to the building on whose courtyard the synagogue was located.
Commemoration
To the Jews in Stralsund remember for the Jewish cemetery at Greifswalder Chaussee in 1988 inaugurated Jews Tele as well as the Jewish street in the historic city. Stumbling blocks have also been laid since 2006 .
The Jewish stele, which was inaugurated on November 1st, 1988 in the corner of Judenstrasse and Apollonienmarkt , was moved to the courtyard of the Johanniskloster in 1992 after repeated damage by graffiti .
In Yad Vashem , the name of Stralsund is listed on one of the stone tablets in the valley of the communities.
literature
- Peter Genz: 170 years of the Jewish community in Stralsund - an overview . In: Margret Heitmann and Julius H. Schoeps (eds.): Keep away from the whole country any ruin. History of the Jews in Pomerania , Hildesheim / Zurich / New York, NY 1995, ISBN 3-487-10074-6
- Irene Diekmann (Ed.): Guide through the Jewish Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania , Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1998, ISBN 3-930850-77-X .
- Herbert Ewe : The old Stralsund. Cultural history of a Baltic city , Verlag Hermann Böhlaus successor, Weimar 1995, ISBN 3-7400-0881-4 .
- Ulrich Grotefeind: History and legal position of the Jews in Pomerania . In Baltic Studies Volume 32, 1930
- Katrin Möller: The Aryanization of Jewish Property in Stralsund , Munich, GRIN Verlag 2003 (thesis at the University of Greifswald)
- Eberhard Schiel: Brown shadows over the sund , Scheunen-Verlag, Kückenshagen 1999, ISBN 3-929370-88-3 .
- Gitte Struck, Thomas Waschk, Henryk Pich: The Keibel-Cohns. On the history of the Jews in Stralsund. , Children's and youth book publisher Mückenschwein, Stralsund 1998,
- Jörg Zink, Madlen Bednarek: Places of Jewish history in Stralsund: a historical city tour. , Kowa, Stralsund / Schwerin 2005 OCLC 255653320 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ulrich Grotefeind: History and legal position of the Jews in Pomerania in Baltic Studies Volume 32, 1930
- ↑ Rosemarie Schuder , Rudolf Hirsch : The yellow spot. Roots and effects of hatred of Jews in German history , Berlin 1987
- ↑ Herbert Ewe : Das alten Stralsund , Weimar 1995, p. 223
- ↑ Heinz Höving: The Jewish community in Stralsund in Der Demokratie on April 2, 1987
- ↑ Herbert Ewe: Das alten Stralsund , Weimar 1995, p. 225
- ^ "The Keibel-Cohns", Mückenschwein-Verlag, Stralsund 1998, p. 109
- ↑ “Stralsunder Tageblatt” November 10, 1938
- ^ “Pommersche Zeitung” November 12, 1939
- ^ Alfred Gottwaldt, Diana Schulle: The 'deportations of Jews' from the German Reich 1941 - 1945. Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 3-86539-059-5 , pp. 33/34
- ^ "Die Keibel-Cohns", Mückenschwein-Verlag, Stralsund 1998, p. 126 / document expulsion notice ( Memento of November 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Herbert Ewe: History of the City of Stralsund , Weimar 1984, p. 324.
- ^ “Stralsunder Zeitung”, September 1913.
- ↑ Stralsund City Archives Rep. 29 No. 51.
