Jewish life in Sondershausen
In the Thuringian district town of Sondershausen, there is evidence of Jewish life since the Middle Ages, with interruptions for over 700 years. The Mikveh special houses , a Jewish ritual bath from around 1300 and a Jewish cemetery , which was laid out in 1699, still bear witness to this today .
history
Jewish life in the Middle Ages
Very little is known from this period, but there is evidence that Jews lived in Sondershausen in the Middle Ages, which just received its town charter around 1300. A witness of this time is the Jewish ritual bath, the mikveh , which existed around 1300 on the western periphery of the old town. It was used for ritual cleansing, for example after menstruation , the puerperium or after an illness. The mikvah in Sondershausen, however, did not belong to a Jewish bathhouse, but to a private residence that was later built into the city wall. It can therefore be assumed that the Jewish community was very small in the Middle Ages. It is not (yet) known where the Jews of that time buried their dead.
With the occurrence of the plague around 1348, the fate of the Jewish community was sealed not only in Sondershausen. Pest pogroms spread from southern France via the cities on the Rhine to Thuringia, sometimes even before the plague occurred in the respective city. The Jews were accused of a. poisoned the wells, angered God and caused the plague. In 1349 a plague pogrom also took place in Sondershausen, in which all Jews in the city were killed or expelled. With that, Jewish life is lost for a long time.
Establishment of a new community around 1700
Only at the end of the 17th century is there evidence of Jewish life in Sondershausen. This is thanks to Count Christian Wilhelm von Schwarzburg-Sondershausen , who was raised to the rank of prince in 1697. In this context, he went to great lengths to make his special houses court worthy of a prince. In addition, he kept himself a “ court Jew ” who took care of the procurement of money and material resources and he favored the arrival of Jewish traders in order to guarantee goods and taxes for his way of life.
Since 1695, the city's Jews were given the status of “protected citizens”. For this they had to acquire their right of residence annually by paying protection money and they were therefore also subject to special legislation.
The Jewish cemetery of that time was created in 1699 by the "protective Jew" Alexander Cantor when he bought a piece of land on Spatenberg, far outside the city walls. This burial site was used as such until the Jewish community was extinguished during the Nazi era and is still maintained today as the city's cultural heritage.
Emancipation in the 19th century
As protective citizens, the special houses were subordinate to special laws and therefore not on an equal footing with the rest of the population. With the entry of the Principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen into the German Confederation and the idea of a constitution, the gradual civic equality of Jews began in 1815. But it wasn't until 1848 that the new regulations were actually implemented in all areas.
With equality, the Jewish community in Sondershausen continued to develop and grow. Up until the 19th century there were only a few families in the city; in 1871 there were already 149 Jews. The cemetery was soon overcrowded, so that in 1884/85 it was necessary to purchase an adjacent mountain garden for expansion.
As the community grew, a place of worship in the royal seat became necessary. In 1826, a synagogue was inaugurated in a back yard that could be entered through a house on Bebrastrasse.
In the middle of the 19th century, an increasing social assimilation into the Christian environment became visible, which in the end was also evident in the culture of graves. Some of the tombs were inscribed in German.
Extinction of the Jewish community
Anti-Semitic attacks began in Sondershausen as early as the first years of the Weimar Republic . After Adolf Hitler came to power and in the period of National Socialism from 1933, terror against Jewish citizens was systematically legalized through Reich legislation. The synagogue was desecrated and desecrated during the November pogroms in 1938 . A fire was not started as the area was densely built up with old half-timbered houses. The cemetery was offered for sale as garden land in 1943, but this could not be realized until the end of the war, so that the Jewish cemetery escaped destruction. The Jewish community in Sondershausen was wiped out by 1945.
The synagogue, which survived the Reichskristallnacht almost unscathed, fell victim to an Allied air raid over Sondershausen in 1945, four weeks before the end of the war. The remains were demolished with the other ailing buildings in the area in the GDR from the 1960s.
Aftertaste
The city of Sondershausen no longer has a Jewish life to show today. But people are aware of their cultural heritage, so that in recent years the history of Judaism in Sondershausen has been intensively reviewed.
With the construction of the shopping center "Galerie am Schlossberg" in 1999 excavations were carried out in which one the mikveh rediscovered in the Middle Ages and the foundations of the synagogue.
The ritual bath was integrated underground into the shopping center and can be viewed at the Sondershausen Castle Museum upon registration . A stone tablet in Bebrastrasse by the gallery is reminiscent of the synagogue.
Today the Jewish cemetery is administered by the Jewish State Community of Thuringia and maintained by the city of Sondershausen and preserved as a memorial. Here, too, an expert tour is possible by arrangement with the castle museum.
Further information can be obtained directly from the castle museum, where Jewish history is described in more detail in the local history section.
swell
- Sondershausen Castle Museum
- Bettina Bärnighausen: The mikveh of Sondershausen. City of Sondershausen, Sondershausen 2003.
- Nathanja Hüttenmeister : The Jewish cemetery of Sondershausen. In: Jews in Schwarzburg. Sandstone, Dresden 2006.
- Jewish heritage in Northern Thuringia. City of Sondershausen, tourist information Nordhausen and Mühlhausen, Sondershausen.
- Bettina Bärnighausen (Red.): Jews in Schwarzburg. Sandstein, Dresden 2006, ISBN 3-937602-74-7 .