Ziegenhain Jewish community

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A Jewish community in Ziegenhain existed in the north Hessian town of Ziegenhain , since 1971 a district of Schwalmstadt in the Schwalm-Eder district , perhaps as early as the second half of the 13th century, but definitely since the second half of the 17th century and then until 1938 / 40.

Development until 1933

A Jewish pogrom is said to have taken place in Ziegenhain even before 1298 , but details of the number of Jewish residents or dates are not known. The presence of Jews in Ziegenhain ended with the Jewish pogroms of the plague years 1348/49 at the latest . Jewish residents are not mentioned again until 1612, but their number remained small. In 1646 there were two Jewish households in the city, and a century later, in 1744, there were still only seven families. Among them were some with an entrepreneurial spirit: around 1694 the manorial wool factory in the Weichaus district was leased to the merchant and protective Jew Joseph Dannenberg, who bought the company in 1697.

By the beginning of the 19th century a community emerged that remained numerically stable throughout the 19th century and only began to shrink at the beginning of the 20th century due to emigration to larger cities or overseas.

year Residents,
total 		Jewish
residents 		Share
in percent
1825 ... 89 ...%
1827 1,650 95 5.8%
1835 ... 95 ...%
1861 1,494 59 3.9%
1871 1,449 78 5.4%
1880 1,745 103 5.9%
1885 1,922 92 4.8%
1895 1,866 93 5.0%
1905 1,707 78 4.6%
1924 2,160 57 2.6%
1933 2,019 53 2.6%

The Jewish heads of household were mostly traders, merchants, and cattle dealers. There were also a few butchers and a Jewish inn.

Community institutions

The community belonged to the Marburg Provincial Rabbinate. From 1853 there was a synagogue , with a mikveh (ritual bath) on the ground floor. The community's cemetery was located in the nearby Nieder Grenzebach . An elementary school existed from 1870 to 1922; after that there was only one religious school. The congregation employed a teacher who was both a prayer leader and a shochet . In 1906 a local branch of the Sabbath Friends Association was founded, and in 1912 a women's association was brought into being.

synagogue

Until 1853 the services took place in a prayer room of a Jewish private house. This was in insufficient condition as early as 1828 and was supposed to be closed, but it still took 25 years before a new synagogue could be inaugurated. On the one hand, the construction of a synagogue meant a considerable financial burden for almost all of the poor families in the community; on the other hand, bureaucratic hurdles had to be overcome. An initially planned synagogue building near the Christian cemetery was rejected by the city administration. In 1837 the Jewish community applied for permission to build a synagogue with a school, teacher's apartment and bathroom as an extension to a residential building that had been built shortly before. But it was not until 1852/53 that the synagogue, a two-story half - timbered building with a hipped roof in the Weichaus district at Kasseler Straße 28 (former Obergasse), was built and inaugurated in June 1853. The main entrance was on Kasseler Strasse. In the front building built in 1835 on the street, the teacher's apartment was on the upper floor, the classroom and the ritual bath on the ground floor; The prayer room with the women's gallery was located in the newly added rear building. To finance the construction, the community had taken out a loan that had to be paid off in annual installments. This did not always succeed: as early as 1855 the mayor applied to the government for aid because the annual rate could not be raised.

The synagogue, which was extensively renovated in 1903, remained the focus of community life until the Nazi era . But when the number of parishioners declined due to emigration and emigration, the building was sold to a Christian family before 1938.

Coordinates: 50 ° 54 ′ 50 ″  N , 9 ° 14 ′ 47 ″  E

school

In 1867/68 ten school-age children were taught by the teacher of the community. Between 1871 and 1887 between 19 and 25 children took part in classes in the Jewish elementary school established in the synagogue building in 1870. The elementary school was closed in 1922, and the church teacher now only gave religious instruction. In 1924 four children still took part in this religious education.

graveyard

The deceased of the community were buried in the Jewish cemetery in Nieder Grenzebach. This was also used by the Treysa Jewish community until 1850 . It is only a few hundred meters northeast of the former synagogue on a hill north of Niederlimitebach and can be reached via the continuation of the Kottenbergweg. The cemetery area covers 58.37 acres . The last burials took place in 1946/47.

( Note: You can get the key to the cemetery at the gate of the district hospital in Ziegenhain (as of September 2008).)

End of the parish

During the First World War , seven men from the Ziegenhain Jewish community were killed, thereby losing 10% of their members at the time; their names can be found on the community memorial for those who died in the First World War. Despite this obvious identification of the Jewish fellow citizens with their homeland, there was increasing anti-Jewish agitation and incidents in Ziegenhain as early as 1904.

In 1933 there were still 53 Jewish residents living in the city. Six of them died in Ziegenhain by 1939. Almost all of the others moved away by 1939 because of the increasing disenfranchisement and reprisals (38 of them to Frankfurt am Main alone ) or emigrated entirely from Germany. During the November pogrom in 1938 , the synagogue building, which had already been sold, was devastated by SA and NSDAP people. The Torah scrolls were stolen; one was found in the moat shortly before the American troops marched in on March 30, 1945. The two remaining Jewish shops and the Jewish apartments were demolished and the Jewish residents of the two houses at Kasseler Strasse 23 and 24 were mistreated. In April 1939 the last Jewish people left the city. Four were able to emigrate to the USA, three to Amsterdam, one to Portugal.

Of the Jewish people born in Ziegenhain and / or who lived there for a long time, at least 34 died violently during the Nazi era.

In June 1995 a memorial plaque was placed next to the entrance of the former synagogue with the following inscription:

“This house is the former synagogue of the Ziegenhain Jewish community. It was desecrated on November 8, 1938. Jews have lived in our city since 1677. During the period of National Socialist tyranny until April 1939, they were victims of disenfranchisement, expulsion and extermination. We cannot escape our history. Only memory creates reconciliation and peace. On behalf of the citizens. The magistrate. Schwalmstadt, June 1995. "

Epilogue 1945–1947

The StaLag IX A prisoner-of-war camp , which was established near Ziegenhain in 1939 and initially served as a prison camp for the US Army after the end of the war , became a camp for displaced persons (DPs) after it was closed in the summer of 1946 . Up to 2,000 Jewish DPs - mostly refugees from Eastern Europe, but also survivors of concentration camps - who were waiting to travel overseas or to Palestine were housed here. In the camp there was a synagogue, a mikveh (ritual bath), a kosher kitchen and a Jewish elementary school. At the end of November 1947 the camp was closed.

In 1948 the former camp became the Trutzhain refugee settlement .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Siegmund Salfeld: "The Jewish policy of Philipps des Großmütigen", In: Historischer Verein für das Großherzogtum Hessen (Ed.): Philipp der Grossmütige: Contributions to the history of his life and his time , Elwert, Marburg, 1904, pp. 519-544 ( 521)
  2. ↑ Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg , the chairman of the anti - Semitic German Social Party , was elected to the Reichstag for the constituency Fritzlar - Homberg - Ziegenhain in 1890 and was a member of the Reichstag until 1911. He was always re-elected with a large majority in his constituency. (Thomas Weidemann: Political anti-Semitism in the German Empire. Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg, member of the Reichstag, and the Fritzlar-Homberg-Ziegenhain constituency in North Hesse. In: Bambey and others: Homeland- expelled neighbors , pp. 113-184)
  3. ↑ The finder, Pastor Paulus, later gave them to a Hungarian Jew who was housed in the Ziegenhain DP camp .

literature

  • Hartwig Bambey, Adolf Biskamp, ​​Bernd Lindenthal (eds.): Displaced neighbors. Contributions to the history of the Jews in the district of Ziegenhain. 2 volumes. Verlag Stadtgeschichtlicher Arbeitskreis e. V., Schwalmstadt-Treysa 1993, ISBN 3-924296-07-3
  • Robert von Friedeburg: Communal anti-Semitism. Christian rural communities and Jews between Eder and Werra from the late 18th to the middle of the 19th century. In: Monika Richarz & Reinhard Rürup (eds.): Jewish life in the country. Series of scientific papers by the Leo Baeck Institute 56, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1997, ISBN 3-16-146842-2 , pp. 139–172.

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