Jewish cemeteries in Lippstadt
There are still two Jewish cemeteries in the urban area of the city of Lippstadt . These are the cemetery of the Jewish community in Lipperode in today's Lipperode district and the burial site at the Lippstadt central cemetery on Lipperoder Strasse. Another Jewish cemetery existed in the area of today's Burgstrasse and was closed in 1914 by the Lippstadt city administration. The latter is the oldest Jewish burial site in the city, it was probably already used before 1700 for the burial of the relatives of the Jewish military supplier Benedict Elias Gumpertz, he himself was buried here in 1708.
The Jewish cemetery on Burgstrasse
The history of the Jewish cemetery on Burgstrasse, which no longer exists today, is closely linked to the settlement history of the first Jews in the Lippstadt city area. These were the army suppliers of the Great Elector of the Mark Brandenburg , Friedrich Wilhelm , Benedict Elias Gumpertz, who, together with his family of eight, settled in Lippstadt in 1669 at the behest of the Elector. He was probably commissioned to regulate the business factors of the fortress construction in Lippstadt, since this location was to be expanded as the western fortress of Prussia . In 1698, Gumpertz's son-in-law, David Hertz, settled, and his sons were later granted civil rights in the city of Lippstadt. Benedict Gumpertz, David Hertz and later his son Gumpert Hertz became the heads of the Brandenburg Jews and were thus undoubtedly part of the Jewish elite of the Mark both economically and religiously. The private prayer room Gumpertz was also very likely the meeting place for the Jews in the vicinity, since at least ten religiously responsible men, the minyan , must be present for a Jewish service .
Gumpertz chose a small plot of land outside the city walls as the burial site, but still within the Lippe arch near the Cappeltor. As a result, the cemetery was outside the city, as is usual in Jewish burial culture, but at the same time it was easy to reach and protected. It was a narrow strip of shore between the old city wall and the Lippe. Between 1628 and 1650, a so-called piatta forma , a gun site for the defense of the city outside the city walls, was located on this site . Due to the growth of the city and the expansion of the fortifications, it was already without military value in 1650 and the area was unused. Today it is assumed that Benedict Gumpertz acquired the site after his arrival in Lippstadt and was buried there in 1708, although he probably used the burial site before for the funeral of deceased relatives.
A first reference to the cemetery is provided by maps from 1680, which show a short branch canal on the lip, which was probably dug for the extraction of earth with which the area was fortified. On the map by Johann Peter Roscher from 1776 it can be seen that by then the cemetery had already exceeded the limits of the former piatta forma and had grown up to the castle mill. No further enlargement took place and until its abandonment the area measured 2.85 ares .
In 1809, the marriage and immigration restrictions for Jews were lifted and the Jewish community in Lippstadt grew from 15 (1808) to 50 in 1829. Very little is known about the number of people buried in the cemetery and their names, and only a few of the last burials of the community are known. It was
- an unnamed infant, died on September 9, 1822 and buried on September 12, 1822
- 73-year-old Bendix Isaak Lilienfeld, died on June 19, 1825 and buried on June 22, 1825
- the 22-year-old cuirassier Heinemann Berliner, died on December 4, 1825 and buried on December 7, 1825
- 89-year-old Bes Bacharach, died on May 27, 1829 and buried on May 30, 1829
- 69-year-old Elias Bacharach, died on November 24, 1832 and buried on November 26, 1832
Due to the growth in the Jewish community, the cemetery was already well filled at the end of the 1820s and in 1831 the then head of the community, Matthias Arend Rosenbaum, asked the Lippstadt mayor Gallenkamp to provide a new Jewish burial site on the Lippstadt central cemetery, which was established in 1821:
- “The main purpose of our presentation is only this: that Ew. Well-born of the local Israelite community, which has grown quite a bit for some years, wanting to have a more suitable Todtenhoff not too far from the city, as the current one is too small and with the expected Cholera Morbus when deaths occur among the Israelite community would not be able to maintain according to your orders. "
- "We believe that we can apply all the more, since, as is well known, the great new Todtenhoff is largely purchased from the city's property, to which we have also contributed through municipal taxes etc. and still have to contribute." (Letter of November 16, 1831, quoted from Fennenkötter 1989)
The mayor's answer has not been passed down, but it was evidently negative, as documented in another letter from Rosenbaum in which he insists on civil equality for Jews:
- "... - Since the position of the Israelites has changed a lot, as is well known, and we have now also become citizens, and have equal civil rights with everyone else, we also believe that the Commendable City Authority will give us a Todtenhoff free of charge can be instructed. "
- “We therefore repeatedly ask for such a suitable place, all the more because apart from the Cappel and Lipperthor there are still dreary grounds that belong to the city. If, contrary to expectations, our request should not be received, we would be obliged to submit our request to higher places ... ” (Letter of November 29, 1831, quoted from Fennenkötter 1989)
The city administration of Lippstadt delayed a decision on this question and Rosenbaum had to write a third letter, almost two weeks after the funeral of Helle Bacharach in 1832, in which, in addition to the urgency (“ .. The churchyard of our community provides us for the result also not one more place, .. ") also the consequences of a possible flood and further rinsing of the area by the lip (" .. by rinsing the bank we have to fear that the corpses of our relatives will be washed away in the event of a flood, too it is located within the city, and therefore its relocation should be desirable from a police point of view. ”) pointed out.
At the beginning of 1833, the city administration provided the Jewish community with an area of 4.9 acres next to the Christian burial sites in the central cemetery, but outside the cemetery walls. Helle Bacharach was the last to be buried in the cemetery on Burgstrasse. According to Jewish tradition, the old cemetery was to be left in its condition and when trees were planted by the city administration in 1838, they had to be removed after a letter of complaint from the Jewish community. Accordingly, the cemetery fell into disrepair and was largely forgotten. Franz Kersting mentioned it in his book " Walk through the city " , published in 1905, as the " old, vanished Jewish cemetery whose last gravestone is in danger of slipping into the Lippe in the near future."
On August 6, 1907, the Jewish community decided to exhume the old corpses due to the repeated threat of flooding and to transfer the remaining body parts to the new cemetery. This was approved with conditions, but initially not carried out. It was considered to sell the site after the abandonment and then got into a dispute with the city administration about the ownership of the site. In a compromise, which stipulated that the community had their burial site enlarged to include the new cemetery, the property was left to the city administration and it was ensured that the remains of the bodies could be exhumed if the city were to use it for disruptive purposes. The final abandonment took place on February 27, 1914. The property was leased to the neighbor who converted it into a garden and later bought it from the city. To this day, the property is a private garden of the former owner's heirs, and has never been exhumed.
In 1986 the gravestone of Isaak Bacharan, the father of Helle Bacharan, who was last buried here, was found during an inspection of the site by the Lippstädter Heimatverein and brought to the Lippstädter Heimatmuseum. This stone is the last stone in the cemetery that still exists today.
The Jewish cemetery in the Lippstadt Central Cemetery
As already mentioned, the Jewish cemetery was laid out in Lippstadt's central cemetery on Lipperoder Strasse in 1833. The plans included five rows of graves and thus around 120 graves, the first row with 24 graves was already occupied in 1857 and a further increase in the Jewish population of 124 people at that time was to be expected.
In 1852 a synagogue was built in Lippstadt , which also contained an elementary school, and in 1853 the synagogue district of Lippstadt was formed on the basis of the law passed in Prussia in 1847, according to which parochial law was stipulated for Jewish communities . Accordingly, all Jews had to belong to a synagogue community in their place of residence. In addition to Lippstadt, the synagogue community of Lippstadt also included the surrounding villages of Overhagen , Hellinghausen , Herringhausen , Benninghausen , Esbeck , Rixbeck , Dedinghausen , Hörste , Mettinghausen and Horn (now part of Erwitte ). With the exception of the Jews of Horn, where there was a small cemetery of their own, all Jews in the community buried their dead in Lippstadt.
At the beginning of 1857, the board of directors of the Jewish community, which consisted of Aron Rosenbaum, Aron Grünebaum and Samuel Schönebörner, sent a request to the city administration to enlarge the cemetery, which was still outside the central cemetery. This was answered on March 4, 1858 by donating an adjacent area, after which the entire area was enclosed with a wall, but there was still no direct access to the neighboring Christian cemetery. Although the Jews were largely integrated into society at this time, there was still regular vandalism in Jewish cemeteries, where tombstones were destroyed.
In 1889/1890 a “ regulation on the use, administration and supervision of the cemetery of the synagogue community in Lippstadt ” was passed, in which the use was legally and financially clarified. With this set of rules, individual burial sites were also introduced, of which the Abel, Rosenbaum and Bacharach families were each awarded one.
By 1911, all family graves were occupied and there were only two rows of 24 grave sites left in the entire cemetery. At the same time there were considerations to sell the old cemetery on Burgstrasse and after lengthy negotiations with the city administration, the municipality was awarded a piece of land of the same size at the new cemetery. The wall was torn down in the east and south and replaced by hedges, and the access was relocated from the north wall to the south hedge. Shortly thereafter, the Christian cemetery was expanded to the east and subsequently enclosed the Jewish cemetery on three sides, so that access was via the Christian part and the integration into the central cemetery was completed. At this point in time, the Jewish population of Lippstadt was actually largely accepted and integrated, especially since the Jews in Germany also saw the country as their home, for which they also stood up in the First World War . After the war, a memorial stone to the fallen Jews was erected in the cemetery, bearing the names of the fallen between the Star of David and the Iron Cross in oak leaves . In the population of Lippstadt, however, there were still problems with the Jews, which manifested themselves in the fact that garbage was carelessly thrown over the hedges on the Jewish cemetery section or flowers were cut off.
With the National Socialist government in Germany from 1933 on, the pressure on the Jewish population and their institutions also increased in Lippstadt. A large part of the community left Lippstadt and Germany; for those who remained, the payment of the contractual fee for maintaining the cemetery became too expensive, so that the last head of the Jewish community, Julius Lichtenfels, asked the city government on January 28 to halve the costs. This was rejected by the mayor. In response to a letter dated February 24, 1936, in which it was requested that work on the Jewish graves be stopped and that access via the Christian cemetery be blocked, the mayor arranged for the clerk in charge to issue an opinion. He replied (in excerpts):
- “(..) The above contracts that the city of Lippstadt concluded with Jews are an intolerable burden for a National Socialist community in the Third Reich. They are also in direct contradiction to our worldview (..) "
- “Because, according to an article in the 'Rote Erde', every civil servant is liable to prosecution if he associates with Jews or gives him service. From all of this, however, it follows that a National Socialist authority is no longer allowed to force city officials and city workers to continue to serve Jews, simply for reasons of morality and also in order not to permanently bring simple German national comrades into a serious conflict of conscience are unworthy of them and slap National Socialism in the face. (..) "
- “(..) Insofar as the petition on February 24, 1936 relates to access to the Jewish cemetery, Jews can be forbidden to enter the municipal cemetery and made it a condition that they only open their cemetery directly through the special entrance to enter Lipperoderlandstrasse, (..) " (quoted from Fennenkötter 1989)
As a result of this response, the mayor canceled the 1922 treaty of the Jews and officially no longer allowed burials in the cemetery. In addition, Jews were forbidden to enter the cemetery through the Christian cemetery. As a result of these bans, the residents even planted potatoes on the graves of the Jewish community without the city authorities intervening. After the so-called Reichspogromnacht 1938, the Jewish community shrank to 18 people, all of whom were older and had finished their lives. The last funeral took place in November 1940, when it was 90-year-old Julie Abel. After she was buried, the cemetery was finally closed, and the cattle dealer Julius Steinberg, who died in Lippstadt on January 23, 1942, was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Anröchte without causing a stir . Between August 1944 and January 1945, seven Jewish forced laborers from Hungary and Slovakia and one baby died in Lippstadt . They were all thrown into an open mass grave in Anröchte.
After the closure, the SA removed the iron bars from the entrance gate, and the local Hitler Youth removed all other usable metal parts. As a result, around half of the tombstones were destroyed - most of them could not be reconstructed or were replaced by reproductions. But even after the war, the city administration only took care of it under pressure from a Jewish member of the British Army who was looking for relatives in Lippstadt. In 1946 the cemetery was cleared of the potato field and restored.
In 1949, the representative of the Jewish community of Paderborn-Lippstadt transferred the remaining, unused part of the Jewish cemetery to the city, in return the city was supposed to take care of the Jewish graves, which it still does today. A new Jewish synagogue community has not yet formed in Lippstadt. The few Jews who live in Lippstadt today have joined the Paderborn community. Since 1949, however, funerals have taken place again (rarely) in Lippstadt.
The cemetery of the Jewish community in Lipperode
Little is known about the Jewish cemetery and the Jewish community in Lipperode . Despite their proximity to Lippstadt, the Jews of Lipperode did not belong to the city's Jewish community. This was mainly due to the special position that Lipperode had together with the Cappel Abbey as an exclave of the state of Lippe until 1938 , only after which it was accepted into the urban area of Lippstadt. Thanks to this special position, Jewish business people were able to partially circumvent the very restrictive Jewish legislation in the state of Lippe and at the same time (largely illegally) trade with business partners in neighboring communities, especially Lippstadt.
The first Jewish settlers in Lipperode have been documented since the end of the 16th century. The synagogue , which is no longer used as such, was first mentioned in 1773, while the oldest tombstone in the Jewish cemetery dates from 1771: in the 1770s, an independent Jewish community evidently formed and established in Lipperode.
The cemetery is away from the village on a piece of land known as New Field. With a width of 10 to 13 meters and a length of about 100 meters, it is a small, elongated plot of land that can only be reached via a dirt road today. Of the former gravestones there are still 37 today, the most recent dating from 1937 (Julie Stern) and 1932 (Alfred Stern, Lina Weinberg). This meant that the cemetery was used continuously from 1771 until the last Jews left Lipperode in 1938.
During the time of National Socialism in Germany, many gravestones were smashed, and some of the stones could no longer be put together. Although the stones that still exist today have been repaired, the damage is still clearly visible and some stones have no inscription panels. After the Second World War, the maintenance of the site was entrusted to the Lipperode community by the Jewish Trust Company ; today the city of Lippstadt takes on this task.
Oldest stones of the Jewish cemetery (before 1800)
Double grave for a couple (1809)
View over the cemetery
Abraham Stern's tomb (1889)
literature
- Hans Christoph Fennenkötter: The Jewish cemeteries in Lippstadt , from the series Lippstädter traces, series of publications of the Heimatbund Lippstadt . Heimatbund Lippstadt eV, 1988. (comprehensive monograph on the cemeteries with a description of the individual tombs and family trees of important families)
Web links
Anröchte | Licking | Lippstadt | Oesterids | Oestinghausen | Rüthen | Schoneberg | Warstein | Werl | Werl-Büderich
