Jewish life in Bochum

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The Jewish life in Bochum can be detected from the 17th century. Bochum is now home to the Jewish unified community Jewish community Bochum-Herne Hattingen .

history

The beginning of Jewish life in Bochum

In 1616 two Jewish families were mentioned by name in a Bochum city ​​bill. It is uncertain whether Bochum had Jewish residents or even a synagogue in the past. In 1736 nine families were already counted. One of them was Dr. Coppilia Pictor, the city's first graduate and post-doctoral doctor. The other heads of the family were shopkeepers, butchers, merchants, moneylenders.

In 1812 the Prussian Jewish edict came into force, which granted the 74 Jews living in Bochum at the time greater freedom in choosing their place of residence. In 1828 a Jewish elementary school was founded. In 1852 there were already 201 Jews in Bochum.

The burials took place at five locations in the urban area of ​​Bochum and the former city of Wattenscheid. Today only the cemetery in Wattenscheid and the cemetery on the Wasserstraße in Bochum are preserved. In Bochum-Stiepel there was a burial place on the street Am Brunen , where the last burial is said to have taken place around 1880.

Establishment of the synagogue community in Bochum

In 1854 the synagogue communities in Bochum were established. Communities also emerged in the neighboring cities of Hattingen and Witten . They were organized as a corporation under public law , which gave them a certain organizational security. The community elected so-called representatives from among its members, who set and controlled the community budget.

Old synagogue in Wilhelmstrasse

In 1863 the Old Bochum Synagogue was inaugurated on what was then Wilhelmstrasse (today Huestrasse). On this occasion, great celebrations took place in which the general population took part.

In 1895/96 the synagogue had to be expanded. At that time around 800 Jews lived in Bochum, mostly as merchants and craftsmen, later also as lawyers and doctors. Some brave people invested in new inventions and future-oriented industries: Jakob Goldstaub founded Bochum's largest and most modern cinema in 1910, Bendix Bloch was the owner of the first advertising agency in Bochum. Bourgeois life in Bochum was shaped and shaped by Jews and non-Jews alike at the time. Jewish men and women were members and chairmen of many Bochum associations. The activities of the associations that existed within the Jewish community were part of life in Bochum.

In 1918 the Jewish cemetery was built on Wasserstraße .

In 1932, the Bochum Jewish community had 1152 members, making it the third largest in Westphalia .

time of the nationalsocialism

After the seizure of power , the Jews in Bochum were persecuted. Jewish businesses were boycotted at first, later expropriated with almost no compensation - this was done by greedy citizens from Bochum or by the local authorities ruled by National Socialists. Jews who were employed by non-Jews were or had to be fired by them. The Jewish minority was so harassed that they could barely support themselves. Some Jews managed to emigrate by 1938. Before that, they lost control of their property through official measures. Then they had to surrender parts of their assets to the German state before emigrating through special taxes invented for this purpose. At the end of October, as part of the Poland Action, many former Jews from Poland were deported overnight in a forced action to Bentschen on the border with Poland. Tens of thousands of Jews were forced to camp there in the open because Poland refused to accept its own citizens. When Herschel Grynszpan, who came from Hanover and who had previously fled from Germany, shot a German diplomat in Paris , the Germans organized the November pogrom in which hundreds of people were killed all over Germany and almost all of the Jewish religious buildings were burned down or otherwise destroyed. The men of Bochum's Jewish families were interned in the Oranienburg concentration camp, where they were abused by SS men, among others. The Jews were only released after several months after they had promised to leave the German Reich shortly. During the following exits, those affected lost almost all of their existing assets due to tightened special information. Mainly because of these persecution measures, the number of members of the Jewish community fell from 1134 to 253 between 1932 and 1941. A very large number of the Jews from Bochum perished in the Shoah . The north station in Bochum played a central role in the deportations .

The department store of Gebr. Alsberg AG was "Aryanized" and renamed Kaufhaus Kortum . One of the beneficiaries of the smashing of the Alsberg group in Cologne was the later billionaire Helmut Horten .

The teacher Else Hirsch helped organize child transports abroad. She herself remained as the only Jewish teacher with the students who stayed behind at the Jewish school in Bochum until she was closed in September 1941. At the end of January 1942, Else Hirsch was deported to the Riga ghetto together with some of her students , where she died around 1943.

The lawyer and notary Carl Rawitzki was banned from working in 1933, went to Berlin and then to Great Britain. Impoverished, he returned to Bochum in 1949 and represented victims on compensation issues.

Siegmund Schoenewald, lawyer and notary as well as chairman of the Jewish community, was banned from working in 1933. On the night of November 9th to 10th, 1938, he was deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was held there for a month. He went to the Netherlands, where his wife followed him in March 1939. Together they emigrated to Great Britain on August 28, 1939. He died there a day later, on August 29, 1939.

New beginning after the Second World War

Nevertheless, there were a few who returned to their hometown of Bochum after the end of the terror regime. In February 1946 there were 33 Jews living in Bochum who tried to create and maintain a lively community again. In September 1947, the city of Bochum made a room available to the members as a prayer room in Brückstrasse 33 b, where the first Jewish wedding after the war took place in October .

Due to the small number of members, the municipalities of Bochum, Herne and Recklinghausen merged in 1953 and were recognized as a public corporation under the name of the Jüdische Kultusgemeinde Bochum-Herne-Recklinghausen . Most of the community life now took place in Recklinghausen, where the new synagogue was inaugurated as early as 1955 .

Based on the agreement between the former Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany, people of Jewish faith were able to move to the Federal Republic of Germany from 1990 onwards. As a result, the number of members developed so positively that the Bochum-Herne-Recklinghausen community split in early 1999; the communities of the Jewish community of Bochum-Herne-Hattingen and the Jewish community of Recklinghausen were established .

Stumbling blocks have been laid in Bochum as part of the commemoration of the Holocaust since 2004 .

New Bochum Synagogue, inaugurated in 2007

On November 14, 2005, Paul Spiegel , President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany , laid the foundation stone for the New Synagogue in Bochum in the presence of over 500 visitors . The synagogue was opened on December 16, 2007. The municipality of Bochum-Herne-Hattingen had 1122 members in 2011, and in 2014 there were 1,065 members. It is the second largest municipality in Westphalia. The chairman of the parish was Grigory Rabinovich. The work of the community includes the implementation of religious events, celebrations and religious education. In addition, it offers its members social support, participation in various clubs and further training courses and organizes sporting and cultural events for all fellow citizens as well as events for children and young people.

In 2017, the members of the community decided not to wear a kippah in public because they were repeatedly exposed to insults as soon as they were recognized as Jews on the street. Much of these attacks come from Muslim youth, my community representative.

See also

literature

  • Ingrid Wölk: From boycott to destruction. Lives of persecution, expulsion and extermination of Jews in Bochum and Wattenscheidt 1933–1945. A source and work book. Edited by Bochum City Archives, Essen 2002 ISBN 978-3-89861-047-6
  • Hubert Schneider: Life after survival: Jews in Bochum after 1945. Writings of the Bochum Center for City History. Klartext, Essen 2014
  • Ingrid Wölk: Leo Baer. 100 years of German-Jewish history. Writings of the Bochum Center for City History. Klartext, Essen 2016
  • Manfred Keller: In the Jewish Bochum: Searching for traces on the Stelenweg. Gimmerthal, Bochum 2019, ISBN 978-3-00-063500-7 German National Library

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gisela Wilbertz: Jewish cemeteries in today's Bochum city area. Brockmeyer Bochum, 1988
  2. ^ Quote from Hanke after Coolibri, 2015
  3. ^ Hubert Schneider: It began in 1933. The persecution of the Bochum Jews. Using the example of the lawyer Dr. Siegmund Schoenewald and his wife Ottilie, b. Mendel. In: Bochumer Punkte , No. 34, August 2015, pp. 3-18.
  4. ↑ http://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/gemeinden/bochum
  5. ↑ http://www.zentralratdjuden.de/de/topic/59.html?gemeinde=50
  6. ↑ The members of the Jewish community in Bochum no longer wear a kipa in public. Radio Bochum , November 16, 2017, archived from the original on November 19, 2017 ; Retrieved November 25, 2017 .
  7. ↑ Leo Baer, ​​b. May 22, 1889 in Bochum, died March 18, 1984 in Toronto . 1938 Sachsenhausen concentration camp. 1939 Emigration with the family to France, Foreign Legion in Algeria, Resistance in France, then to Canada