Jewish community Leipzig

Leipzig synagogue on Keilstrasse

The Israelite Religious Community in Leipzig was not founded until 1847, although traces of Jewish life in Leipzig can be traced back to the Middle Ages . However, it was not until the middle of the 19th century that Jews were allowed to settle permanently in Leipzig.

From this time on, a diverse Jewish life developed in Leipzig. The newcomers increasingly emancipated themselves as Leipzig citizens. Synagogues were built, schools founded. In just one hundred years, the Leipzig Kehillah became the sixth largest in Germany and the largest in Saxony . In 1925 it had around 13,000 members.

This development was the 1933 seizure of power by the Nazis suddenly interrupted. At the end of the war in 1945, 24 of the former 13,000 members of the Jewish community in Leipzig were left.

In the 1990s, the Leo Baeck Institute filmed personal documents available there on behalf of the Israelite Religious Community in Leipzig. The microfilms include the membership cards of the Israelite Congregation from 1935 to 1943 and 1945 to 1990 and the alphabetical card index of the deportees, created from the transport lists of the extermination camps from 1942 to 1944. A burial fragment covers the period from 1815 to 1860 with gaps.

Today the community is again the largest Jewish community in Saxony with over 1300 members.

The congregation celebrates its services in the Brody synagogue . Since September 2010 she has been Rabbi Zsolt Balla, who is also a member of the three-person board of the Orthodox Rabbinical Conference .

literature

• Steffen Held, Monika Richarz : Leipzig. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 3: He-Lu. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02503-6 , pp. 491-496.

Web links

• Israelite religious community in Leipzig. In: www.irg-leipzig.de. Retrieved February 28, 2018 . 
• Jews in Leipzig. In: www.juden.de. Retrieved February 28, 2018 . 
• "Jewish Leipzig" project. In: www.juedischesleipzig.de. Retrieved on February 28, 2018 (with audio tour). 
• Jewish Leipzig. A small city guide. (PDF; 1 MB) (No longer available online.) In: www.juden-in-sachsen.de. Archived from the original on October 10, 2013 ; accessed on February 28, 2018 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ 22359 Collection Israelitische Religionsgemeinde zu Leipzig, microfilms. In: State Archives Leipzig. Retrieved March 30, 2020 . 
2. ^ Rabbi Zsolt Balla. In: www.ordonline.de. Orthodox Rabbinical Conference Germany, accessed on February 28, 2018 .