History of the Jews in Osnabrück
The history of the Jews in Osnabrück probably began in the second half of the 13th century .
history
Only a few Jewish families lived in the city until the middle of the 15th century . They were then forbidden to settle in Osnabrück . Until the early 19th century, they were only allowed a short stay to do business; in particular the city council tried to prevent their settlement at the instigation of craftsmen and traders. Jews in Osnabrück received civil rights for the first time after 1807. At the end of the 19th century the Jewish community had grown to over 400 members. After the Holocaust , five Jews still lived in the city in 1945. The community did not reach more than 400 members until the end of the 20th century.
13th to 15th centuries
The first documented Jew recorded in Osnabrück was a man named Jacobus in 1267. In Cologne around 1260 Vivis von Osnabrück was named as a Jew. At the beginning of the 14th century, several Jews lived in the city as moneylenders . They settled in the center of the old town on Schweinestrasse, which was renamed Marienstraße in 1882 and is in the immediate vicinity of the town hall and the market. The house of prayer, the so-called Jewish school , was also located in Schweinestrasse .
Engelbert II. Von Weyhe , bishop of Osnabrück since 1309, was dependent on creditors and issued letters of protection to Jews and their families against the will of the city council . The city council issued a series of ordinances to prevent undesirable economic competition. Bishop Gottfried von Arnsberg , who was Bishop of Osnabrück from 1321 to 1349, also issued letters of protection to Jews, despite municipal resistance, so that they could use them as moneylenders. In the 14th century, the Jewish residents had a cemetery on Westerberg .
The number of Jews remained small and declined in the mid-14th century due to pogroms during a plague epidemic. Bishop Johann II. Hoet then allowed Jews to settle, but responded to the council's demand not to allow further settlements. Bishop Johann III. von Diepholz banned 1424 Jews from permanent residence in the city. Presumably, Jews lived in Osnabrück until about the middle of the 15th century, because the episcopal decree was renewed in 1431 and ten years later.
15th century to early 19th century
From 1424 to 1808, Jews were only allowed to stay in the city in transit or at cattle markets. They were subject to harassment by the administration. They were only allowed to stay during the day; for overnight stays, for example, they had to apply for official approval.
19th century and 20th century to 1933
After the abolition of the Principality of Osnabrück in 1802 and the city temporarily belonging to the Kingdom of Prussia , Osnabrück became part of the Kingdom of Westphalia in 1807 . The constitution of the Kingdom of Westphalia provided for the equality of all subjects before the law, and the free exercise of worship in the various religious societies . However, the city continued to try to prevent the settlement of Jews.
The first Jewish citizen at this time was Nathan Beer from Lower Franconia. In 1810 he bought a house in the old town and was involved in financial transactions. In the same year, 25 Jews lived in eight families in Osnabrück. The rights of Jewish residents were again restricted when the city belonged to the Kingdom of Hanover from 1815; they were merely tolerated. In particular, the craftsmen's guilds and the Krameramt saw Jews as competition to be fought. As a result, few Jewish families continued to live in the city. However, their number slowly increased, so that by the 1860s there were Jewish merchants, entrepreneurs such as a cigar manufacturer, bankers, teachers and members of other professions with their families. The number of members of the synagogue community rose from 138 in 1871 to 379 in 1880. In 1873 the Chewra Kadischa was founded, in 1882 the Israelite Women's Association. There was also a local branch of the Esra Association , which helped to settle pogrom refugees from the Russian Empire in Palestine.
In 1890 the Jewish community had 423 members. In 1905, when the foundation stone was laid for what was later to be called the Old Synagogue , it had 480 members. Until then, the congregation had held its services first in the Tuchfeldtschen house at Hakenstrasse 16, from around 1850 in the house at Bierstrasse 18 and from 1872 in a house at the Barefoot Monastery. The Osnabrück Jews buried their dead in the re-taken over cemetery on Westerberg. It was closed in 1876 by order of the city and a new one was laid out on Magdalenenstrasse in Neustadt. The corpses were reburied from the Westerberg to the new cemetery by 1894 and the old cemetery was built over.
From 1886 the community had its own school at the Barefoot Monastery; by then, Jewish students had attended Christian schools. The Jewish elementary school had around 40 pupils in 1901, other Jewish children attended public schools. In 1913 the Association for Jewish History and Culture and a local group of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith were founded, which 72 Jews from Osnabrück joined in the year it was founded. The Zionist Association was initially of lesser importance for Germany . In the First World War were six members of the community.
Well-known companies of Jewish residents were the Alsberg family department store, “Aryanized” as the Lengermann and Trieschmann department store in 1935 , the Wertheim household goods store and the Meyer art and antiques store. There were also the two department stores or stores Philipps and Schönfeld. Well-known Jews in the city included the head of the municipal hospital, Siegfried Pelz (1848–1936), who was made an honorary citizen of the city in 1928, and the hardware dealer Philipp Nussbaum, who built a representative villa in 1922 not far from Osnabrück Castle . His son Felix Nussbaum , born in 1904, became a painter.
During the Weimar Republic , Jews from Osnabrück were increasingly committed to the common good of the city; in particular, they took on tasks in welfare work . Many promoted club and cultural life. Fritz Behrend, who had been Kapellmeister since 1926, became director of the Osnabrück City Theater, which opened in 1909, in 1931 . In 1929 a B'nai-B'rith lodge was established.
In Osnabrück there were local associations of the Jewish youth movement such as the Young Jewish Hiking Association , the Blue and White Hiking Association or the Jewish Boy Scout Association Germany . A Jewish gymnastics and sports club was founded after the Osnabrück gymnastics club excluded Jews in 1924. The Osnabrück tennis club did not accept Jews from the outset, which led to the founding of the Jewish tennis club, which had its own tennis court.
With Hugo Krakauer, the community received its own rabbi in 1925 after conflicts with the Emden district rabbinate . However, he only served until 1930.
Anti-Semitic incidents occurred in the city as early as the 1920s. As early as 1926 there was a local group of the National Socialist German Workers' Party , which received 27.6 percent of the vote in the 1930 Reichstag election , and a local assault department of the NSDAP. In 1928, the NSDAP local group leader issued a leaflet calling for a boycott of Jewish shops. He was fined for insulting a Jewish merchant. His co-defendants were acquitted.
The mouthpiece of anti-Jewish agitation was the weekly newspaper Der Stadtwächter , which was published by an alternative practitioner. The editor and one editor were fined after another boycott call in 1929. The publisher Schierbaum joined the city guard party for local elections in 1929; it received the third highest number of votes cast, but was only able to fill five of the seven seats. The city guard was hired in 1931. The preferred meeting place for the anti-Semites was the Germania Inn .
1933 to 1945
When the National Socialists came to power in Germany, the persecution of the Jews in Osnabrück through boycott measures began on March 31/1 . April 1933 around 40 Jewish shops. The customers as well as visitors to doctors 'and lawyers' practices were photographed and their photos displayed in a showcase at the shop of the NSDAP local group leader Erwin Kolkmeyer. Jewish doctors, lawyers and merchants were taken into " protective custody " for two days . In April 1933, theater director Fritz Behrend was dismissed. The Law to Restore the Professional Civil Service , passed on April 7, 1933, provided the means to remove Jewish civil servants from their offices. Jews were excluded from associations, according to the businessman Philipp Nussbaum from the cavalry association at the end of 1933 , to which he had been a member for 34 years since 1899. In 1933 around 30 Jewish residents of Osnabrück emigrated.
There were new calls for boycotts against Jewish businesses in August 1935. On August 20, 1935, 25,000 to 30,000 people took part in a public event entitled Osnabrück and the Jewish Question . This event was described by the mayor as an "awareness campaign".
In November 1935, the Alsberg department store with 151 employees and the Wertheim household goods store were “aryanized”. The owner of the Tenge house , Otto David , was also forced to sell . He survived the Holocaust, Gertrud David, born in 1898, was murdered by gas in the Brandenburg State Sanctuary. Around 200 Jews had emigrated from Osnabrück by the end of 1936.
In 1938 a Jewish man from Osnabrück was convicted of " racial disgrace ". He died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp after his three years' imprisonment . In October 1938, 182 members of the Jewish community were still living in the city.
During the November pogroms in 1938 , the synagogue was set on fire and Mayor Erich Gaertner (1882–1973) ordered it to be demolished on the same day. Between 80 and 90 Jewish men, as well as an unknown number of women and non-Jewish spouses - including Jews from nearby towns - were arrested after some of them had been ill-treated. They were in the Gestapo cellars of Osnabrücker castle housed. Around 60 Jews were transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp , and Jewish men with non-Jewish wives were sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . 60 Jewish citizens fled immediately after the November pogroms.
Jewish residents of Osnabrück emigrated to Palestine (44), the USA (43), Great Britain (19) and, to a lesser extent, other European countries, South America (17), Africa (9) and China (3). The 83 Jews who emigrated to the Netherlands included the family of Peter van Pels , born in 1926, who was one of Anne Frank's companions in suffering in Amsterdam in the hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht , today's Anne Frank House .
In May 1939 the Jews still living in the city were sent to so-called Jewish houses . Eight Jewish patients lived in the Provincial Sanatorium in the former Gertrudenberg Monastery.They were first brought with other patients in November 1940 to the Wunstorf Sanatorium and from there to the Nazi killing center in Brandenburg , where they were murdered.
In February 1941, only 69 Jews were still living in Osnabrück. In December 1941, deportations to Riga (Latvia) began. The deportees may have been brought to the Jungfernhof concentration camp. Of the 35 people on the first transport, five survived. 27 Jews were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in July 1942 . Seven Jews lived in the Judenhaus at Kommenderiestraße 11 until 1943 , where 25 people were still housed in August 1941. The remaining residents were deported to Auschwitz . Of the Jews from Osnabrück who emigrated to the Netherlands, including the parents of the painter Felix Nussbaum, his brother Justus and his niece Marianne, 40 were taken to concentration camps. In February 1945 six Jews with non-Jewish spouses were deported from Osnabrück to Theresienstadt.
After 1945
Five Jewish people from Osnabrück survived the Holocaust. Among them was Ewald Aul , who in December 1941 after Riga deported had been and from there to the Stutthof concentration camp came. He returned to Osnabrück, founded the synagogue community there with the four other survivors and was its head for many years. In 1980 he co-founded the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation e. V. Osnabrück. In 2006 the city of Osnabrück awarded him the Citizen Medal.
The community was created through the influx of survivors from the concentration camps and the states of Eastern Europe. In October 1945 it had 45 members. A makeshift synagogue was set up in the former Jewish school on Rolandstrasse - now Alte Synagogen Strasse. An attack was carried out against the synagogue on December 17, 1945, when the windows of the building were smashed with stones.
Nine suspects of the November pogrom of 1938 were brought to court in 1949, including the former NSDAP local group leader Erwin Kolkmeyer. He and two other defendants were sentenced to ten months in prison. Like other convicts, they appealed; In 1952 the sentence was reduced by one month at a time. The NSDAP district leader Wilhelm Münzer was acquitted in the first trial.
Since 1969, the Jewish community has had a new synagogue and a community center on “In der Barlage” street in the Weststadt district . The buildings were planned by the Frankfurt architect Hermann Guttmann. In the same year 25 Jews lived in Osnabrück, the remaining 39 members of the community in the Osnabrück administrative district . After 1991 the community grew through quota refugees from the states of the former Soviet Union to about 400 in 1996.
In 1978, three memorial plaques were placed on the building of the former district government, the extension of which was built in the 1950s on the site of the destroyed synagogue. A part of Rolandstraße, which is adjacent to the extension building, was named Alte-Synagogen-Straße. A memorial for the Old Synagogue was erected in 2004.
In 1998, the Felix Nussbaum House planned by Daniel Libeskind was opened and houses the world's largest collection of works by the Osnabrück painter. It also shows works by his wife Felka Platek , who, like him, was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 .
Stolpersteine have been laid in Osnabrück since 2007 in memory of murdered Osnabrück Jews, politicians, clergymen and trade unionists. Stolpersteine in front of Neue Straße 20 are a reminder of Israel, Johanna, Siegfried and Julius Silbermann. Israel Silbermann, his wife Johanna and their son Siegfried lived in the Judenhaus on Kommenderiestraße until they were deported ; her son Julius had already been deported in 1938. The youngest son had successfully emigrated to Great Britain.
The synagogue from 1969 on In der Barlage was expanded in 2009/2010 in a construction period of 14 months for 3.6 million euros. In 2010 the community had around 1000 members, the majority of whom came from the states of the former Soviet Union.
See also
literature
Tamar Avraham, Daniel Fraenkel: Osnabrück In: Herbert Obenaus (Ed.) In collaboration with David Bankier and Daniel Fraenkel: Historical Handbook of the Jewish Communities in Lower Saxony and Bremen Volume 2. Göttingen 2005, pp. 1196–1220, ISBN 3-89244- 753-5 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Royal Decree of December 7, 1807, which decreed the publication of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Westphalia
- ^ Directory of the honorary citizens of Osnabrück
- ↑ Refugees, expelled, deported and murdered - Jewish fates in the Nazi era
- ^ Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation e. V. Osnabrück ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Bearer of the citizen medal of the city of Osnabrück
- ^ Felix Nussbaum House
- ↑ Stolpersteine in Osnabrück ( Memento of the original from April 15, 2009 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.
- ↑ Osnabrück celebrates its new synagogue ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: NDR online from February 3, 2010
Web links
Regional Association of the Jewish Communities of Lower Saxony :
Bad Nenndorf |
Schaumburg district |
Hanover |
Religious Community Hildesheim |
Osnabrück |
Braunschweig |
District of Hameln-Pyrmont |
Oldenburg |
Hildesheim |
Jewish-Sephardic-Bukhari Congregation |
Orthodox Jewish community in Wolfsburg
State association of the Israelite religious communities of Lower Saxony :
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Liberal Jewish Community Hanover |
Seesen |
Liberal Jewish community Wolfsburg / Braunschweig region