Wittmund Jewish community

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The Jewish cemetery in Wittmund on Auricher Strasse

The Jewish community in Wittmund existed for a period of around 300 years from its beginnings in the 17th century to its end on October 23, 1941.

History of the Jewish community in Wittmund

The Harlingerland , which consists of the old offices of Esen , Stedesdorf and Wittmund , was an independent territory until it was united with the county of East Friesland in 1600.

The old Jewish cemetery in Wittmund on Finkenburgstrasse

Various later sources indicate that Jews initially settled here in Wittmund. Balthasar Arend, pastor in Berdum 1684 reports: “The Jews have had their school and meeting here for over one and a half hundred years, but they have to give the Mennists protection money and at the end look for and receive letters of protection. They also have a churchyard outside the patch by the gardens, which is said to have been much larger in the past, so without knowing where it came from, that it was reduced in size. The Jews of Esens and Neustadt in the glory of Gödens also bring their dead to this cemetery and are obliged to maintain this cemetery at the same time. ”Jekutiel Blitz is said to be born around 1634 in Wittmund. He was the first to translate the Bible into Yiddish . This can only be proven on the basis of Amsterdam sources in which Wittmund is given as the place of birth, but can still be assumed to be certain, since a Jewish Blitz family has been found in Wittmund since the beginning of the 18th century.

17th century to 1744

The first concrete reference to the presence of Jews in Wittmund comes from the year 1639. Here, the Jude Moyses Nathans zu Wittmund is mentioned in a list, who had to pay protection money of half a rose noble for 1637. The general escort letter issued by Count Ulrich II on June 13, 1645 mentions the three Jews David Abrahams, Moyses Nathans and Gottschalk Isaacs in Wittmund. The community developed through immigration in the following years and by 1676 eight Jewish families were living in Wittmund. For the second half of the 17th century, business connections between Wittmund Jews and the fair in Leipzig can be proven.

As in the rest of East Friesland, most of the Jews lived from the butcher's trade. According to a list of all working residents of Wittmund from 1714, of the eleven Jews listed there, ten were butcher, only Nathan Elias was a merchant.

By 1736 at the latest, Jews also settled in the surrounding areas, such as Altfunnixsiel and Carolinensiel . This emerges from the general letter of passage of the last East Frisian prince Carl Edzard . It shows for the first time tendencies to limit the Jewish population. Only twelve Jewish families were supposed to be allowed to settle in the Wittmund office.

1744 to 1933

In 1744, after the Cirksena died out, East Frisia fell to Prussia and Frederick II had a general table of East Frisian Jews drawn up. According to this, 13 Jewish families lived in Wittmund at that time. A total of 65 people of Jewish faith lived in Wittmund. Nothing had changed in terms of the employment structure. Most of them still lived from the butcher's trade, a few were horse traders and textile traders. Only two Jews operated money lending as a sideline.

A census carried out in the Wittmund office in 1749 recorded 16 Jewish families. Like the Cirksena, the Prussians also wanted to reduce the proportion of Jews in Wittmund. Only ten Jewish households were to be tolerated in the Wittmund office. However, this had no impact on the Jewish community , whose membership still comprised 16 families in 1775.

Former Jewish school in Wittmund

Initially, the Jewish community in Wittmund only owned one "school location". The private house in which it was housed served the community as a community center and synagogue for many years . The exact construction date is unknown, but there is an insurance document from the Fire Fund from 1905, which says about 150 years in the column "Age of the building". In 1897 a fire broke out in the neighboring building, as a result of which the parish hall was also affected. The damage could soon be repaired, but the building no longer met the requirements and so the municipality initially planned to demolish the building and build a new one on the property. However, this plan was soon discarded and the building was finally sold to the merchant Blessmann, who was thus able to add the adjacent building to his house, which burned down in 1897. The new plan now envisaged building the school building on Buttstrasse, where the community had already bought a building from the Behrends family in 1851 for 425 Reichsmarks gold and used it as a poor house. The plan was to demolish the old poor house and build a school building with an apartment for the teacher and a ritual bath here. Construction began in 1910, and the inauguration ceremony took place in December 1911. The school was used until 1924 and the building has been preserved in its former state to this day.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Jewish community in Wittmund planned to build an independent synagogue . Before that, the services were held in a private house, which also served as a school. The then synagogue head Abraham Arends Neumark presented these plans to the mayor of the Fleckens, Müller. The Jewish community wanted to raise part of the construction costs through a house collection. This was initially rejected by the higher authority, but finally approved on April 1, 1815 by the civil governor von Vinke over a period of eight weeks.

The building was a one-story brick building. In the direction of Kirchstrasse (east side) there was a stone tablet between two high windows with the text from Exodus, 19.6 in Hebrew script: “And you shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy people to me”. There were four tall windows on the north side. The entrance was on the south side between the Blessmann department store and the synagogue and could be reached through an approximately 1.50 m wide wage. The building was insured with the Ostfriesische Landschaftliche Firekasse with 5000 Marks. The length of the building was 10.30 m, the width 6.90 m and the height under the roof 8.00 m. The built-up area was thus 71 m². It offered space for 60 - 80 people. The places for the women were on the west side on a gallery. Between two rows of benches stood the bima , the raised place for the rabbi . The chandelier and the altar ceiling were donated by Philipp Neumark, a community member, on the occasion of his 71st birthday. Between the two high windows on the east side stood the Torah cabinet , in it was Torah scroll kept.

In 1829 the Jewish community in Wittmund still had a rather poor social structure. Six of the 16 families living in the village were very poor. An independent Jewish school system also developed late in Wittmund, so that the school-age children had to attend the local Christian school in 1843. Only religious instruction took place in the community center, even if the students often had to do without a teacher for a long time. During these times, young people took over the instruction of their younger classmates.

The Jewish cemetery was now within the village and was almost fully occupied. Since extensions were no longer possible here, the Jewish community acquired a plot of land outside the village on Auricher Strasse in 1899, which was used from 1902 to 1939.

In the meantime, new laws had brought civil rights for Jews in East Frisia as well. The occupational restrictions for Jewish citizens also fell away, so that the employment structure was now somewhat more diverse. The directory of tradespeople in Wittmund lists colonial goods dealers, vegetable and fruit dealers, dealers with household items and other products, small cattle dealers, tinkerers, lottery collectors, manufactured goods dealers, horse dealers, butchers, tailors, shoe dealers, day laborers, second-hand dealers and cattle dealers.

During the First World War, Jews from Wittmund went to the front for the German Reich. At least one died and at least eight were wounded. The Jewish community also participated in the war collections.

During the Weimar Republic, the number of Jewish citizens residing in Wittmund fell to 45 (1930).

1933 to 1941

Memorial plaque at the site of the demolished synagogue at Kirchstrasse 12

If economic reasons had caused the Jewish population to move away even before 1933, the exodus of the Wittmund Jews began after the National Socialists came to power. After 1933 the synagogue was hardly used any more because the required number of ten male worshipers for a minyan was no longer achieved. The last preacher, teacher and cantor , Abraham Straßfeld, emigrated to the USA with his family on March 27, 1935 . The synagogue was finally sold by the Jewish community to a merchant for demolition in June 1938. It did not fall victim to the November pogroms , but was torn down beforehand. Nevertheless, Jewish citizens' houses in Wittmund were broken into, their shops and private property plundered and 20 community members rounded up. The SA initially took this to the marketplace. After they had to stand there under guard for a few hours, they were taken to the "Gastwirtschaft Bauer", where they were locked in a stable. The women were released the next morning. The men were transferred to Oldenburg along with around 200 other Jewish East Frisians, where they were rounded up in a barracks. Approx. 1,000 Jewish East Frisians, Oldenburgs and Bremen residents were then deported by train to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, where they remained imprisoned until December 1938 or early 1939. Little by little they were released.

The Jewish community in Wittmund quickly dissolved after the November pogroms. At the instigation of East Frisian district administrators and the municipal authorities of the city of Emden, the Gestapo control center in Wilhelmshaven issued an instruction that Jews should leave East Frisia by April 1, 1940. The East Frisian Jews had to look for other apartments within the German Reich (with the exception of Hamburg and the areas on the left bank of the Rhine). On April 16, 1940, Wittmund was declared " Jew-free " by the district inspector .

Community development

year Parishioners
1645 3 families
1676 8 families
1710 51 people
1749 16 families
1775 16 families
1802 60 people
1867 93 people
1885 86 people
1905 71 people
1925 53 people
1925 45 people

Memorials

Memorial for the murdered Jewish citizens of Wittmund
  • The memorial for the murdered Jewish citizens of Wittmund was inaugurated on September 3, 2000 in the Jewish cemetery. There the names of 48 - since the addition of the names of Max and Josef Julius Neumark meanwhile 50 - are mentioned murdered people.
  • Memorial plaque on the site of the demolished synagogue at Kirchstrasse 12. The outlines of the synagogue are marked by black basalt stones.

Jewish personalities from Wittmund

See also

literature

  • The end of the Jews in East Frisia. Catalog for the exhibition of the East Frisian landscape on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Verlag Ostfriesische Landschaft, Aurich 1988, ISBN 3-925365-41-9
  • Daniel Fraenkel: Wittmund. In: Herbert Obenaus (Ed.): Historical manual of the Jewish communities in Lower Saxony and Bremen . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-753-5 ; Pp. 1567-1573
  • Edzard Eichenbaum (Ed.): The Wittmunder Synagoge - Against forgetting . In: Heimatverein Wittmund e. V. Local history sheets , Wittmund 2005, issue 2
  • Edzard Eichenbaum: Genealogy of 21 Jewish families from Wittmund in words and pictures , unpublished
  • Edzard Eichenbaum: Documentation of the Jewish cemeteries in Wittmund 1 and 2 with information , unpublished

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Balthasar Arend in H. Reimers (Ed.): Landesbeschreibung vom Harlingerland Wittmund 1930, p. 157
  2. ↑ Herbert Reyer, Martin Tielke (Ed.): Frisia Judaica. Contributions to the history of the Jews in East Frisia . Aurich 1988, ISBN 3-925365-40-0 , p. 172
  3. ↑ Selma Stern: The Prussian State and the Jews. III: The time of Frederick the Great , Tübingen 1971, p. 1470 f.
  4. ↑ Edzard Eichenbaum (ed.): The Jewish school in Wittmund and their teachers . In: Heimatverein Wittmund e. V. Heimatkundliche Blätter , Wittmund 2005, issue 2, p. 1
  5. ↑ Edzard Eichenbaum (ed.): The Wittmunder Synagogue - Against forgetting . In: Heimatverein Wittmund e. V. Heimatkundliche Blätter , Wittmund 2002, Heft 1, S. 4
  6. ↑ Herbert Reyer, Martin Tielke (Ed.): Frisia Judaica. Contributions to the history of the Jews in East Frisia . Aurich 1988, ISBN 3-925365-40-0 , p. 175

Coordinates: 53 ° 35 '  N , 7 ° 45'  E