Jewish cemetery (Windecken)

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View of the site from the southwest

The Jewish cemetery Windecken was the cemetery for the inhabitants of the Jewish faith in Windecken , town of Nidderau in the Main-Kinzig district in Hesse .

Geographical location

The Jewish cemetery is located on the corner of Eugen-Kaiser-Straße / former B 45 west of the historic center of Windecken. Opposite is the Evangelical Community Center, where the old Christian cemetery in Windeckens was previously located. Below runs the Nidder or the Mühlgraben.

history

founding

Residents of the Jewish faith can be found in Windecken since the 14th century. Until 1497, the Windeck Jews buried their dead in the Jewish cemetery Battonnstrasse in Frankfurt . 47 Windeck Jews are known by name who were buried in Frankfurt. In 1482 the Frankfurt Council decided to drastically increase the funeral fees after the right of foreign Jews to a funeral in Frankfurt was questioned as early as 1438–1444. Various attempts to mediate in writing by Count Philipp the Younger of Hanau-Munzenberg , whose territory included Windecken, failed. The dispute dragged on for several years. The hardship became apparent in 1494 when seven Jews were killed in a major fire in Niederrodenbach , some of whose relatives were seized because of the burial costs in Frankfurt.

Finally, in 1497, the count drew the conclusions and assigned the Jews of the County of Hanau-Münzenberg to an area in Windecken as a cemetery. On November 4, 1497 it is documented that Philipp Graf von Hanau, with the approval of the Mainz vicar Wolf von Bicken, allowed the Jews to bury their doden bodies in the Windecker Termini and to give them a garden in front of the Steder Tore next to the Rhaitshoffe , the sheep farm located, assigned.

Early modern age

The burial of foreign Jews, mainly from the county, was regulated as early as 1497. So the Hanau Jews buried until the establishment of the second Hanau Jewish cemetery in Windecken in 1603/1608, the inhabitants of Bockenheim of the Jewish faith until 1714, from Heldenbergen until 1818, and those from Marköbel until 1824. The cemetery thus became a kind of central cemetery for the Jews in the county of Hanau-Munzenberg. Thanks to its own synagogue, Judengasse and its own cemetery, Windecken was the suburb for the Jewish residents of the County of Hanau-Münzenberg until a Jewish community resettled in Hanau in 1603.

Extensions of the cemetery can be proven by documents (mostly property purchase) in the years 1715, 1835 and 1884. Since 1824 the elders of the community were obliged to keep a synagogue book in German. The book of the Windecker Gemeinde was confiscated in November 1938 and filmed on microfilm in the Reichssippenamt . After 1945, the roll of film came to the Hessian Main State Archives in Wiesbaden , so that the names of the dead have been known since around 1825. Between 1825 and 1925, around 200 burials took place in the Windeck cemetery.

destruction

As a result of the repression of the National Socialists, the number of Jews living in Windecken fell from 31 in 1933 to 12 in November 1938. At the penultimate burial in the cemetery in August 1935 (businessman Julius Kahn), the residents were massively intimidated by the SA , so that only a few gentiles still took part. Willi Müller was the last person to be buried in the cemetery in April 1937.

The cemetery was presumably desecrated and desecrated in November 1938, when the synagogue, the parish hall and the Jewish school were destroyed. Most of the tombstones were knocked over. There are no precise details. On May 22, 1939, burials in the cemetery were forbidden by the district administrator; Jewish burials were to take place exclusively in the cemetery in Langenselbold . In January 1941, the state police were closed. In the previous year, Salli Reichenberg, as chairman of the Jewish community, had to sell the site to the city for well below the price (3444 m² at 0.10 Reichsmarks per square meter = 344.40 RM). The purchase contract is dated April 15, 1940, but the amount was not paid out to the community, but transferred from the Windecker Stadtkasse to the Reich Association of Jews in Germany controlled by the Gestapo .

The desecrated cemetery lay fallow in the following years. Some of the tombstones were sold in 1942 to a stonemason made of broken quarry for 100 RM . He probably reworked them into gravestones. Another part was reused in 1942 as a staircase for an entrance to the Windeck town hall. After the area was cleared, a barrack was built there in 1943 as a kindergarten or children's home for the National Socialist People's Welfare . The kindergarten was closed after the air raid on Hanau on March 19, 1945 in order to accommodate three bombed-out families in the building.

post war period

The city's purchase of the site in 1940 was rendered ineffective by Military Government Law No. 59 . In 1949 the city turned to the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) to buy the property. In the 1950s there was additional pressure from descendants of Jewish families from Windecken to restore the cemetery, which the city initially resisted. After an initial judgment forced the city to return it to the JRSO, the parties agreed in June 1955 that the barracks should be demolished and the site restored. This happened in 1957. In the same year a memorial stone with a Star of David was erected for the dead of the Jewish communities Windecken and Ostheim . During the work, four older sandstone tombstones were found and mostly placed in the vicinity of the memorial stone, but facing south instead of east. The tombstones cleared in 1942 remained lost.

investment

The cemetery is still 1879 m² in size, but it used to be considerably larger. On the south side, where the entrance gate is, it is bordered by a stone wall, on the other sides by a metal fence. A key for the gate is available from the cemetery administration.

Next to the memorial stone there are only four gravestones with barely legible inscriptions on the site, three of them in the immediate vicinity of the memorial stone:

  • Malchen Adler, b. Strauss (born 1837 in Ober-Seemen , died 1897 in Ostheim )
  • Moritz Stern (born 1874, died 1909 in Windecken)
  • Ephraim Wolf (died 1888 in Windecken)

At the bottom of the fence is a heavily weathered fourth stone.

literature

  • Paul Arnsberg : The Jewish communities in Hesse. Beginning - fall - new beginning. Volume II. Published by the regional association of Jewish communities in Hesse, Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt 1972, ISBN 3-7973-0213-4 , pp. 406-408.
  • Monica Kingreen: Jewish country life in Windecken, Ostheim and Heldenbergen. CoCon, Hanau 1994, ISBN 3-928100-23-8 , pp. 93-104.

Web links

Commons : Jewish Cemetery  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Arnsberg: The Jewish communities in Hesse. Beginning - fall - new beginning. Volume II. Frankfurt 1971, p. 406.
  2. ↑ Monica Kingreen: Jewish country life in Windecken, Ostheim and Heldenbergen. Hanau 1994, p. 93f.
  3. ^ HStA Marburg 86 Hanauer supplements no.28021
  4. ↑ Monica Kingreen: Jewish country life in Windecken, Ostheim and Heldenbergen. Hanau 1994, p. 95.
  5. ↑ Eckhard Meise : Die Hanauer Judenstättigkeit from December 28, 1603. In: Stadtzeit 6. 700 years city law, 400 years Jewish population. Hanau 2003, ISBN 3-9806988-8-2 , p. 236.
  6. ↑ Monica Kingreen: Jewish country life in Windecken, Ostheim and Heldenbergen. Hanau 1994, p. 99.
  7. ^ Paul Arnsberg: The Jewish communities in Hesse. Beginning - fall - new beginning. Volume II. Frankfurt 1971, pp. 407f.
  8. ↑ Monica Kingreen: Jewish country life in Windecken, Ostheim and Heldenbergen. Hanau 1994, p. 98.
  9. ↑ Monica Kingreen: Jewish country life in Windecken, Ostheim and Heldenbergen. Hanau 1994, pp. 98-101.

Coordinates: 50 ° 13 ′ 19.4 ″  N , 8 ° 52 ′ 31 ″  E