Jerusalem Church (Hamburg)

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Jerusalem Church in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel

The Jerusalem Church in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel was built from 1911 to 1912 according to plans by Johannes Grotjan in the neo-Romanesque style on Schäferkampsallee / corner of Moorkamp. Originally the church served the mission of the Jews through the Presbyterian Church in Ireland . In 1942 the church was destroyed in an air raid and rebuilt until 1953. The congregation has been part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hamburg since 1962 . The Jerusalem Church is a listed building and, together with the Jerusalem Hospital and Deaconess House, is part of a building ensemble .

history

The Jerusalem congregation in Hamburg was founded by the mission society of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in the middle of the 19th century with the aim of supporting Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe and preaching the Christian message to them (“ Jewish mission ”). In the second half of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, Hamburg was an important transit port for Jewish emigrants overseas. Between 1881 and 1914, over a million Jewish people embarked in Hamburg, most of them from tsarist Russia.

The first Presbyterian missionary sent from Ireland to Hamburg was William Graham (1810-1883), who came from County Antrim (now Northern Ireland). Graham began his missionary work in Damascus in 1842, then came to Hamburg as a preacher, which he left again in 1850/51 to work in Bonn. The mission work in Damascus, the Irish mission house in Bonn (later the Johanneum Evangelist School ) and the mission in Hamburg were the foreign stations of the mission to Jews of the Irish Presbyterian Church.

The Hamburg congregation celebrated its services in German and English, first in the rooms of the Patriotic Society , then in the English Reformed Church at the Johannisbollwerk. The next missionary in the congregation was James Craig (1818–1899) from the Irish county of Derry , who took office in Hamburg in May 1845. Craig pushed ahead with building his own church in Hamburg. Before the General Assembly of his church in Belfast , he argued that, given the growing size of the congregation, a new building would be cheaper than renting someone else's space. The General Assembly supported the purchase of a piece of land on Königstrasse (now Poststrasse) in Neustadt with 500 pounds. Construction began in the summer of 1861 based on designs by Ernst Glüer and Carl Remé . On July 13, 1862, the congregation, under the leadership of Craig, dedicated the first Jerusalem Church. In 1874 Craig left the Hamburg congregation and went to London.

Pastor Craig was followed by Pastor John Cambell Aston. Later missionaries of the community were even baptized Jews, most significantly the baptized by Pastor Aston in 1877, from Austria-Hungary -born Arnold Frank (1859-1965). Pastor Frank began his pastoral position in the Jerusalem church in 1884 and held it until 1938.

Since the work of the community was spread over too many locations, the community decided under Frank's leadership to consolidate at one location. At the corner of Schäferkampsallee and Moorkamp, ​​the community found a plot of land measuring 3570 m 2 . Because of the route of the subway under the site, no high-density development with multi-storey buildings was an option, which lowered the price. Because the Hamburg Jerusalem congregation did not form a separate legal entity, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland from Belfast acquired the property for them in 1911 for 55,000 m from the city. The square meter price of 15.40 gold marks corresponds to 5.522 grams of fine gold . On Easter Sunday 1912, the newly built church in Schäferkampsallee was consecrated and the congregation moved there. Shortly afterwards, the congregation built a deaconess institution and the Jerusalem hospital on the same property . The congregation published the Jewish mission magazine Zions Freund .

In the first years of National Socialist rule, subordination to the Irish Church still offered a certain protection. In August 1938 the Gestapo arrested Pastors Frank and Moser, and in September 1938 they both left for England. In 1939 community work was banned. During air raids on the night of July 26th to 27th, 1942 - a good year before Operation Gomorrah - the main nave of the church was destroyed by incendiary bombs. The neighboring Jerusalem Hospital was also hit but was able to be repaired. The destroyed church, however, was only later rebuilt in a simplified form based on the design by Kurt Schrieber. The church was rededicated on June 21, 1953.

In 1961 the congregation was incorporated into the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hamburg , to which it has belonged directly and without parochial district since January 1, 1962 . After the annihilation of the Jews , a “mission to the Jews” in the sense of the 19th century was out of the question, but the “Church for Service to Israel in the Ev.-Luth. Church in the Hamburg State ”continues to have its special status. The restoration of the church was not yet completed at the time of the takeover, so the takeover contract contained the obligation to carry out the "remaining reconstruction of the Jerusalem church and the repair of the roof of the parish hall".

Architecture and equipment

The Jerusalem Church is a brick church in the neo-Romanesque style. The church contains five mosaics designed by Grotjan himself. During the reconstruction in 1953, the restoration of the cross roof was dispensed with, the church was given a gable roof instead.

The organ rebuilt in 1983 comes from Jehmlich Orgelbau . The instrument, which looks close to the neo-baroque sound ideal, has 15  registers that are on slider chests and are distributed over two manuals and pedal .

In 2007 the Hamburg Monument Protection Agency placed the church, the community hall and the Jerusalem Hospital under monument protection.

literature

  • Church council of the Jerusalem congregation (ed.): 100 years of the parish festival of the Jerusalem Church in Hamburg: 1912–2012 . Hamburg 2012.
  • Harald Jenner: 150 years of Jerusalem work in Hamburg: Jerusalem Congregation, Diakoniewerk Jerusalem . Jerusalem Congregation, Hamburg 2003.
  • Harald Jenner: Jerusalem work in the 19th and 20th centuries . In: Inge Mager (Ed.): Hamburg Church History in Essays. Part 4 (The 19th Century). ( Works on the church history of Hamburg , Volume 27). Hamburg University Press, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-943423-02-0 , pp. 441-482.

Web links

Commons : Jerusalem Church (Hamburg-Eimsbüttel)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jürgen Sielemann: Emigration (keyword). In: Kirsten Heinsohn (ed.): The Jewish Hamburg: a historical reference work . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-8353-0004-0 , p. 28f.
  2. ^ A b c Nicholas M. Railton: The Irish missionary to Jews James Craig and the revival movement in northern Germany . In: Pietism and Modern Times: A Yearbook on the History of Modern Protestantism , Volume 30. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, pp. 140–155.
  3. ↑ Thomas Hamilton: Graham, William (1810-1883) . In: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, Volume 22
  4. ↑ James Craig: The Gospel on the continent: incidents in the life of James Craig . Hodder and Stoughton, London 1895, pp. 180-182. ( Online )
  5. ^ Hans Brunswig: Firestorm over Hamburg: the air raids on Hamburg in World War II and their consequences , 6th edition. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-87943-570-7 , pp. 140f.
  6. ↑ Takeover agreement of December 19, 1961, quoted from Jenner, p. 158.
  7. ↑ record 2009612 in the organ database
  8. ↑ Hamburg Cultural Authority: List of monuments as of February 21, 2017, monument no. 17663 (Schäferkampsallee 36), p 4024. ( Hamburger monument lists ( Memento of the original June 2, 2015 Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested Please review the original and archive link under. Instructions and then remove this Note. ) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hamburg.de

Coordinates: 53 ° 34 ′ 9.6 ″  N , 9 ° 58 ′ 1.2 ″  E