Jewish community Karlsruhe

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Public Hanukkah celebration on Karlsruhe's market square , 2016

The Jewish Community of Karlsruhe ( Hebrew ק"ק קרלסרוהה) is an Israelite religious community in North Baden. Their forerunners in the districts of Durlach and Grötzingen , which are now incorporated into Karlsruhe, date back to the Middle Ages. It has existed since around 1717, interrupted between 1940 and 1945. The community is part of the Baden Israelite religious community .

Historical development

1715-1800

In 1715, Margrave Karl Wilhelm von Baden-Durlach laid the foundation stone for the sun-shaped Baden residence in the Hardtwald. Anyone who had a fortune of 500 guilders and built a model house could become a citizen with a corresponding privilege. This applied only to a limited extent to Israelites, who were accepted as protection Jews only for protection money . The earliest recorded admission to this status was on July 6, 1717 and concerned Isaac Benjamin Caan with his wife Fradel. Among the first were Joseph Jacob from Ettlingen (later: Ettlinger), who built the stables, Rabbi Nathan Uri Cahn, born in Metz , who came from Pforzheim to the capital of the margraviate in 1720 , and Emanuel ("Mändel") from Durlach ( later: Reutlinger), who, as Jewish worship, was jointly responsible with the rabbi for lower jurisdiction, observance of the laws of the Torah and the taxation of members. He was succeeded in his office by court factor Salomon Mayer from Wesel in 1724 , next to whom a synagogue council was formed. The Salomon-Mayer Foundation (later the Model Foundation) became a house of learning ( Bet Ha-Midrash ).

As early as 1723, the community laid out its own cemetery at Rüppurrer Tor , with a hostel for passing begging Jews and a hospital nearby. In 1724 the community acquired a house with a garden on Kronenstrasse, in which they set up a prayer room, school and ritual bath ( mikveh ).

Rabbi Cahn died in 1750. Nathanael Weil , who had worked in Prague for many years, was appointed as his successor . In 1752, the Karlsruhe Jewish Regulations, negotiated between the government and community representatives, came into force, which regulated the rights and obligations of Israelite residents according to secular law and religious law and which remained in effect until 1808/9. In 1755, the Christian printer Held, with the help of Jewish typesetters, published the first Hebrew book printed in the city, Rabbi Weil's Talmud Commentary Korban Netanel . Other titles followed, printed by Held's successor Lotter, including Jechiel Heilprins Seder ha-Dorot (1769) and the first edition of Jonathan Eybeschütz ' Yearot Dvash ("Honigwälder", 1779/82).

The Chevro Kaddisha (Gemilus Chasodim) burial brotherhood has been in the Karlsruhe community since 1762 and traditionally - in addition to caring for the deceased - also takes care of the social needs of families and the elderly. A dense network of religious foundations and charitable associations developed around them.

When Rabbi Weil died on a visit to Rastatt in 1769 , a dispute broke out over where he should be buried. The people of Karlsruhe prevailed against the Jews of Baden-Baden, and the body was transferred in a large funeral procession accompanied by the military. The grave of "Korben Nesanel" , venerated as a Gaon , as he was called in Ashkenazi after his main work, is located in the old Jewish cemetery on Kriegsstrasse ; At the time of May, people pray at his grave every year to this day. His son Jedidia Tia Weil took over the office of rabbi in 1770.

In 1783 the liberal Margrave Karl Friedrich lifted serfdom (which was no longer practiced in Baden) . The margravial house gained the highest esteem among the Jews for the associated tax breaks and the permission to change residence without permission from the court.

The community developed significantly in the first decades: in 1724, 24 Jewish heads of families were named in the election for community offices. In 1733 there were already 62 Jewish families with a total of 282 people. By 1800 the church had grown to around 530 adult members.

Weinbrenner's first synagogue (around 1810)
Courtyard of the Kronenstrasse synagogue

In 1798, Friedrich Weinbrenner began building the new synagogue on Kronenstrasse, which was inaugurated eight years later.

19th century

In 1809, an edict by the Grand Duke initiated the first steps towards the legal equality of the Jewish religious community with other denominations. This went hand in hand with the establishment of the Upper Council of the Israelites in Baden, based in Karlsruhe, in accordance with a church consistory. In the same year Ascher Löw (-Wallerstein) was appointed rabbi; until 1837 he held the office. Naphtali Epstein from Karlsruhe made a name for himself as the first Jewish student in Baden and later secretary to the upper council . He organized a legally founded Jewish school system in Baden and advocated moderate reforms in the cult .

In 1819, on the initiative of the banker Salomon Haber, a reformed "temple association" was founded. Ten families prayed in German based on the Berlin or Hamburg model and set themselves apart from the traditionally minded families. Around 1830 further disputes began about civil emancipation, in which the Karlsruhe community played a key role.

Jakob Jokew ben Aharon Ettlinger , born in Karlsruhe in 1798, student of Ascher Löw and temporarily Talmud teacher at Elias Wormser'schen Lehrhaus, from 1836 chief rabbi and Av Bet-Din in Altona, initiated an influential orthodox counter-movement that had its pious followers especially in Karlsruhe .

As early as the end of the 18th century, a printing company for Hebrew ritual literature had been established in Karlsruhe, which worked under Pelte Epstein and Löw and Hirsch Wormser as the Grand Ducal Privileged Hebrew Book Printing Company until around 1840.

During the fire in the court theater in 1847, parishioner Moritz Reutlinger saved numerous visitors from the flames and smoke gases and was honored for this by the Grand Duke and many citizens, while anti-Semitism also flared up in many places as part of the revolutionary movement in Baden .

In 1862, the law on civil equality for the Israelites, at least in theory, brought equal opportunities to study and public office, but it also marked increasing assimilation and the gradual loss of Jewish traditions. Orthodox residents of Karlsruhe opposed this from the middle of the century and decided to leave the majority congregation in 1869/70 when the liberal majority were planning to install an organ to renovate the synagogue.

At the same time, the Jews of Baden were given extensive freedom of trade and were promoted to state offices. The Karlsruhe lawyer Dr. Rudolf Kusel took a seat in the Baden Assembly of Estates in 1861 , and Moritz Ellstätter from Karlsruhe became Minister of Finance in 1868.

After the synagogue in Kronenstrasse was destroyed in a fire in a neighboring house in 1871, a new building with a parish hall and apartments was built according to plans by Josef Durm in the years 1872–75 .

Turn of the century until 1933

Grötzingen Jewish cemetery

Around 1900 the city administration decided to widen the Kriegsstrasse at Mendelssohnplatz (the old Rüppurrer Tor). The local cemetery got in the way of the project. Against the bitter resistance of both communities, who pointed to the inviolability of Jewish cemeteries according to the laws of the Torah , the city forced the dissolution of the cemetery and the reburial of the dead.

Based on the synagogue music by Lewandowski and Sulzer , a lively musical life developed in the synagogue on Kronenstrasse from around the turn of the century. Kapellmeister Kurt Stern conducted and composed, the non-Jewish music professor Theodor Munz composed, played the organ on Shabbat and led the choir, Ruth Porita (Poritzky) took on similar tasks on other occasions , who - like her singing colleague Elsa Eis - occasionally took part in the Liturgy.

At the beginning of the century, Judaism flourished in the city. In 1925 the city had 3,386 Jewish inhabitants, of which around 60% belonged to the liberal to conservative main congregation, around 20% of the exit congregation.

The Karlsruhe interior minister, Ludwig Haas, gained some fame when the monarchy was overthrown in November 1918 , when he stood at the head of a troop of soldiers to protect the family of the abdicated Grand Duke Friedrich . Rooted in liberal Judaism, lawyer Dr. Haas as a “German citizen of the Jewish faith”.

The Jewish association system in Karlsruhe was diverse. Most of the associations had members from both the majority congregation and from the Orthodoxy. So there were the traditional Israelite women’s, bread support and men’s sick associations; from more recent times local branches of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith and the Reich Association of Jewish Front Soldiers as well as the Karl Friedrich Lodge of the Bne Brit . The Chaim Nachman Bialik teaching house , the TCK 03 gymnastics club and the Hakoah sports club were among the newly founded institutions of the time .

Persecutions and the Holocaust

Karlsruhe Torah scroll (Krautheim, probably 13th century), today in the Wolfson Museum Jerusalem

Since 1933, families from the rural area began to immigrate to Karlsruhe, and at the same time emigration to western countries and the increased Aliyah to the Mandate of Palestine . In 1936 all school-age children were sent to a separate Jewish school on Markgrafenstrasse.

At the end of October 1938 about 60 male Jews originally from Poland were deported from Karlsruhe to the border in Zbąszyń (Bentschen) during the so-called “ Poland Action ” , and their families mostly followed suit. Many of them were subsequently killed in Polish ghettos and camps.

During the November pogrom on 9/10 November 1938, the synagogue on Kronenstrasse was partially destroyed and the synagogue on Karl-Friedrich-Strasse was set on fire. Prayer rooms, Jewish shops and apartments were devastated, people were beaten up by organized hordes. Several hundred Jewish men were placed in "protective custody" and in the following days were deported to the Dachau concentration camp , abused and forced to emigrate soon.

The Karlsruhe Adolf Loebel rescued from the destroyed synagogue Kronenstraße one around the 13th century in Krautheim resulting Torah scroll , hid them in the attic of the adjacent village hall and brought them to his emigration in 1945 in the United States. Later he gave what is perhaps the oldest surviving Sefer Torah of Baden to the Sir Isaac and Lady Edith Wolfson Museum in Jerusalem.

On October 22, 1940, in the " Wagner-Bürckel Action ", 15 months before the Wannsee Conference , almost 900 men, women and children were taken from their homes and deported by train to the Gurs camp in the unoccupied south of France near the Pyrenees . From there, most of them were later deported to the extermination camps in the east and murdered there. Over a third of the city's pre-war Jewish population, nearly 1,100, lost their lives in the Holocaust .

1945 until today

The new synagogue has the layout of a Star of David

After 1945, some members of the community returned to their former hometown, for example from the Nachmann , Freund and Weißmann families . Persecuted people from Eastern Europe came from the DP camps and began a new community life in Herrenstrasse 14. From the late 1980s onwards, immigration from Russia and the CIS countries revitalized the outdated religious community. Today the synagogue community in Knielinger Allee has nearly 900 members and sees itself as a unified community that offers a home to different directions. Prayer is done according to the Orthodox rite. Today the Karlsruhe congregation has a full-time prayer leader , Menachem Brummer, and is (as of 2017) looking for a rabbi after Arie Folger was called to Vienna . There is a day-care center and religious instruction, and there are plans to build a mikveh .

Rabbis and Cantors (selection)

  • Nathan Uri Cahn (? –1750), rabbi from 1718 to 1749
  • Netanel Weil (1687–1769), Chief Rabbi from 1750 to 1769 ("Korban Netanel")
  • Tiah Weil (1721–1805), rabbi from 1770 to 1805
  • Ascher Löw (1754–1837), chief rabbi from 1809 to 1837
  • Elias Willstätter (1796–1842), rabbinical administrator from 1837 to 1842
  • Benjamin Willstätter (1813–1895), rabbi from 1842 to 1874
  • Adolf (Arie) Schwarz (1846–1931), rabbi from 1875 to 1893
  • Leopold Treitel (1845–1931), 2nd city rabbi from 1884 to 1895
  • David Sander (1867–1939), 2nd city rabbi from 1895 to 1896
  • Salomon Posner (1866–1942), 2nd city rabbi from 1897 to 1903
  • Moses Lippmann (1867–1945), cantor and religion teacher from 1896 to 1934
  • Juda Bergmann (1874–1956), 2nd city rabbi in 1903
  • Samuel Rubin (1846–1909), senior cantor until 1909, student of Salomon Sulzer
  • Julius Zimels (1872–1955), 2nd city rabbi from 1904 to 1912
  • Meier Appel (1851–1919), city rabbi from 1894 to 1919
  • Simon Metzger (1878–1955), cantor from 1914 to 1925, senior cantor until 1939
  • Siegfried Speyer (1876–1942), cantor and religion teacher from 1923 to 1939
  • Hermann Löb (1884–1962), 2nd city rabbi from 1913 to 1917
  • Viktor Kurrein (1881–1974), 2nd city rabbi 1918, city rabbi from 1919 to 1923
  • Julius Cohn (1878–1940), 2nd city rabbi from 1919 to 1925
  • Hugo Schiff (1892–1986), city rabbi from 1925 to the end of 1938
  • Hans (Yaakov) Andorn (1903–1945), 2nd city rabbi from 1932 to 1934
  • Ulrich Steuer (1912–1973), 2nd city rabbi 1934–1936
  • Jakob Wechsler (1882–1942), cantor and religion teacher from 1939 to 1940
  • Zeev-Wolf Rubins (* 1972), rabbi from 2010 to 2013
  • Arie Folger (* 1974), rabbi from 2014 to 2016
  • Shlomo (Zalman) Jhudovitz (* 1971), rabbi since 2019

literature

  • Jael Paulus: The Jewish community Karlsruhe . In: Jews in Baden 1809–1984. 175 years senior council of the Israelites of Baden . Karlsruhe 1984, pp. 227-233.
  • Heinz Schmitt (Ed.): Jews in Karlsruhe. Contributions to their history [...] . Badenia, 2nd ed., Karlsruhe 1990, pp. 41-80
  • Hans Oppenheimer: Karlsruhe: image of a community . In: CV-Zeitung No. 44, October 29, 1936, pp. 7-10
  • Moshe Nathan Rosenfeld: Jewish printing in Karlsruhe: a concise bibliography of Hebrew and Yiddish publications printed in Karlsruhe between 1755 and 1840 . London 1997.
  • Berthold Rosenthal : From the youth of the Jewish community in Karlsruhe . In: Monthly for the history and science of Judaism . H. 4, 1927. pp. 207-220.
  • YES tenth: On the history of the Jews in the margraviate of Baden-Durlach . In: Journal for the history of the Upper Rhine . Vol. 51, NF 12 and Vol. 54, NF 15.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Protective recordings of Jews in Karlsruhe, zsgest. from EO Bräunche according to GLA 206 No. 2192, cf. Jews in Karlsruhe , p. 514 f.
  2. ↑ cf. Carsten Wilke: Book letter from Mexico. Hannah Arendt's treasure chests in the land of the Aztecs. In: Kalonymos 8th year 2005, no. 1, pp. 1–3 http://www.steinheim-institut.de/edocs/kalonymos/kalonymos_2005_1.pdf
  3. ↑ Marie Salaba in: Jews in Karlsruhe , p 293
  4. ↑ EO Bräunche in: Jews in Karlsruhe , p. 42
  5. ↑ See Frankfurter Israelitisches Familienblatt, No 37, September 29, 1921, p. 2
  6. ↑ Josef Werner: Swastika and Star of David. The fate of the Karlsruhe Jews in the Third Reich . Karlsruhe: Badenia, 2nd ed. 1990, pp. 14 and 287
  7. ↑ Information from the Karlsruhe City Archives, 2016
  8. ↑ http://www.jg-karlsruhe.de/ , as of 2016
  9. ↑ cf. http://gedenkbuch.informedia.de/index.php/PID/12/name/11/
  10. ↑ in the lit. often wrong, cf. but http://stadtlexikon.karlsruhe.de/index.php/De:Lexikon:ereig-0297 and Generallandesarchiv KA 235/12661.
  11. ↑ Tina Kampf: "The traveling rabbi settles down in Karlsruhe" Zeev-Wolf Rubins has convinced the Jewish community , - BNN v. November 19, 2010
  12. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 16, 2017 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ordonline.de
  13. ↑ http://www.ordonline.de/rabbiner/haben_arie/

Web links

Commons : Judaism in Karlsruhe  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files