Jewish life in Hohenems
Jewish life in Hohenems began in 1617 with the settlement of the first Jews by the local imperial count family and ended in 1942 with the deportation of the last Jewish woman from Hohenems to the Theresienstadt concentration camp . Many traces of Jewish history can still be found in the city today. For example the still used cemetery in the south, the former synagogue, the former Jewish school, the former care home for the elderly and poor of the Jewish community as well as numerous town houses and manufacturers' villas.
As early as 1905, the Hohenems rabbi Aron Tänzer laid the basis for research into this history with his extensive history of the Jews in Hohenems . In the meantime, numerous publications and a video film have been published on the Jewish history of Hohenems, anti-Semitism and the time of National Socialism in Vorarlberg or the question of how to deal with the former Jewish quarter in Hohenems, which are available in the Jewish Museum Hohenems , among others .
history
In 1617 a letter of protection from Imperial Count Kaspar von Hohenems laid the legal basis for the settlement of Jewish families and the establishment of a Jewish community . The imperial count hoped that this would generate economic impetus for his market. There were evictions in the 17th century, but after Jewish families were allowed to return, the Jewish community flourished. A synagogue , a ritual bath ( mikveh ), a poor home and a Jewish cemetery were built.
In 1797 , Herz Jakob Kitzinger from Augsburg founded the first coffee house in Vorarlberg. The "Kitzinger Coffee House" was soon a meeting place for a wide variety of Israelite social groups. In 1813, Jewish citizens founded the reading society in this house. The community grew continuously until the first half of the 19th century, with the number of Jewish residents reaching its peak in 1862 with 564 people. The basic state laws of 1867 and the associated free choice of residence for Jews then led to a strong emigration to surrounding cities, so that in 1890 only 118 Jews lived in the city.
In 1935 the Jewish community had 35 members. In 1938 after the annexation of Austria , Jewish property was Aryanized by the Hohenems community . This was followed by the forced dissolution of the religious community in 1940 and the deportation of remaining community members to concentration and extermination camps . Frieda Nagelberg was the last Jewish woman to be deported from the Vorarlberg area on February 25, 1942 . After the war ended in 1945, Jewish DPs were temporarily resettled. None of the former parishioners returned.
Jewish quarter
Far beyond Vorarlberg, the Jewish quarter in Hohenems is one of the few ensembles with a Jewish history that has been completely preserved. In 1996, the main parts of the Jewish Quarter were placed under protection by the Federal Monuments Office. Together with the former Christengasse (today Marktstrasse), the former Jewish quarter forms the urban core of Hohenems. The historical building stock of the city center is a cultural and historical testimony to the centuries-long coexistence of two traditional communities - the Christian and the Jewish - in this place.
The current building stock in the Jewish quarter dates back to the late 18th and 19th centuries. In addition to the houses of the Jewish families, all the buildings that once served religious or social community functions have been preserved: the synagogue, the mikvah (ritual bath), the schoolhouse and the poor and old people's house.
The Jewish quarter reflects the social situation of the Jewish people from Hohenems. They were responsible for trade and moneylending: urban functions that they performed in the rural areas. Count Kaspar had brought the Jews to his county for these tasks. They were oriented towards the bourgeoisie and supported the development of a bourgeois society which, with the industrial revolution from the middle of the 18th century, established urban ways of life in the countryside as well.
Architecture and living conditions
The square in front of the former synagogue in the center of the Jewish Quarter is framed on one side by mighty town houses that were built at the end of the 18th century. Around the former synagogue itself there are still many small and less representative houses of the Jewish craftsmen and peddlers. The architecturally outstanding buildings of the quarter form the three villas of the Jewish factory owner family Rosenthal, built in the classical style, which were built between 1848 and 1889. As early as the 19th century, Christian families moved into former Jewish houses, just as in the former Christengasse, from 1810 at the latest, Jewish families lived in "Christian houses". For decades, Christian and Jewish families lived under one roof in many buildings.
From the second half of the 19th century, many members of the Jewish community from Hohenems emigrated to the economic centers of nearby Switzerland, the cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or overseas. In 1938 only a few houses in the Jewish quarter were owned by Jews. The public buildings were confiscated by the Nazi municipal administration and restored after 1945. After 1945 no more Jewish community life could establish itself in Hohenems.
Exemplary biographies
Salomon Sulzer
Salomon Sulzer (1804–1890) was born in 1804 in Hohenems. After studying in Karlsruhe and France, the only sixteen-year-old was given the position of cantor at the Hohenems synagogue. In 1826 Sulzer was appointed cantor at the Vienna City Temple, which had been newly built the year before , where he founded the “Vienna Rite” together with preacher Isaak Noah Mannheimer - a moderate type of reform that was accepted by both innovators and traditionalists.
Sulzer was soon regarded as a distinctive personality outside of Viennese Jewry. Salomon Sulzer's wonderful baritone was known far beyond the city limits. His enthusiastic admirers and friends included the composers Franz Schubert , Franz Liszt , Giacomo Meyerbeer , Robert Schumann and Niccolò Paganini , who often visited the Vienna City Temple to hear Sulzer.
The main compositional work of Sulzer, which also established his reputation as a reformer of synagogue song , is the Shir Zion (Song of Zion) , which was published in two parts, with mostly self-composed works for use in worship. The new compositions were written for the first time with four-part choir accompaniment and influenced the style of prayer in many synagogues .
He wrote the two volumes of Shir Zion , in which all the prayers of the year are collected. This has shaped synagogue singing to this day. In addition, Sulzer was active as a composer of secular songs: In addition to revolutionary songs, he set poems by Goethe to music . Sulzer died in 1890 and was buried in Vienna. His synagogue music still frames the services at the Vienna City Temple today, and in the Anglo-Saxon-speaking area it is part of the repertoire of numerous synagogues.
Aron dancer
synagogue
The former synagogue in Hohenems
The synagogue, built in 1771/72 according to plans by the Bregenzerwald master builder Peter Bein , which was converted into a fire station in 1954/55, occupies a central position within the Jewish quarter in Hohenems and in the discussion about how to deal with this history. The imposing barrel-vaulted hall was an early and widely unique example of a late baroque-classicist state synagogue.
The furnishings inside the synagogue corresponded to the general guidelines for synagogues at the time, but had a special feature: the ceiling paintings were not, as is usual in synagogues, ornamental-abstract paintings, such as a blue starry sky, but figurative representations. Topics were the creation of light (above the prayer desk in the east), in the middle the revelation on Mount Sinai and a sea of clouds with flashing lightning. On the north and south walls there were five medallions with representations from the synagogue cult.
The synagogue was first converted between 1863 and 1867 according to plans by the Swiss architect Felix Wilhelm Kubly . The changes included the construction of a new sacred shrine and pulpit, new seats for the rabbi, the cantor and the parish clerk, and the relocation of the lectern from the center of the room to a pedestal in front of the Torah shrine . A new gallery was built for the choir and the harmonium donated by Salomon Sulzer .
Seizure and Destruction
Although the synagogue was spared attacks on the Night of the Reichspogrom on November 9, 1938, after the forced dissolution of the Jewish community, the Hohenems community managed to take over the building , which had been going on for a long time in September 1940 . The plans to rebuild the synagogue were not carried out during the National Socialist era . On November 17, 1938, however, the ritual objects in the synagogue had been confiscated. A detailed inventory list provides information about the objects that have since disappeared.
After the end of the war in 1945, Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) were temporarily housed, which led to complaints from the local population, who complained about noise pollution on Jewish holidays. After the building was restored by the French administration in the post-war years, the Hohenems community decided in the 1950s to buy the former synagogue building from the Innsbruck community and to convert it into a fire station. With this conversion in 1954/1955, all elements that had reminded of the building's function as a synagogue were finally destroyed. The former prayer room was divided into two floors. The ceiling paintings and parts of the vault were removed as well as all sacral elements of the outer facade. The arched windows and the oval windows above were replaced by angular ones. Three garage doors dominated the east facade, on which an apse once pointed to the Torah shrine inside. Instead of the bell tower, a hose tower was installed. Until 2001 the building was used as a fire station.
Reconstruction and new perspectives
50 years after it was converted into a fire station, a new way of dealing with history became apparent at the Hohenems synagogue. After the fire brigade moved out in 2001, the building under the direction of the architects Ada and Reinhard Rinderer was subjected to a comprehensive partial reconstruction in a simple and dignified form, the old window arrangement with its high arches and ox eyes , the cubature of the prayer room and the former women's, later restored choir gallery. Since 2004 the building has served as the headquarters of the “tonart” music school. The hall has been used as the Salomon Sulzer Hall for cultural and other events since May 2006, with awareness of its history and as a place for intercultural encounters.
See also
- Jewish community for Tyrol and Vorarlberg
- Hohenems Jewish cemetery
- Jewish Museum Hohenems
- History of the Jews in Lindau (Lake Constance)
Individual evidence
- ↑ www.jewishencyclopedia.com , accessed November 11, 2012
swell
- Aron Dancer: The History of the Jews in Hohenems . Unchanged reprint of the first edition by FW Ellmenreich's Verlag, Meran 1905. Verlagbuchhandlung H. Lingenhöle & Co. Bregenz 1982.
- Karl Heinz Burmeister , Alois Niederstätter (ed.): Documents on the history of the Jews in Vorarlberg from the 17th to the 19th century (= Vorarlberger Landesarchiv [Hrsg.]: Research on the history of Vorarlbergs . Volume 9 (AF)). Vorarlberger Verlagsanstalt, Dornbirn 1988.
- 300 years of Jewish history