Jewish Pioneer's Memorial Museum

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Raleigh Street Synagogue in Richmond Hill, Port Elizabeth

The Jewish Pioneer's Memorial Museum (also Raleigh Street Synagogue ) in Port Elizabeth is a museum facility and archive on Jewish life in this South African port city. It has been in a former synagogue since 1986 .

local community

The Jewish Orthodox Congregation ( Port Elizabeth Orthodox Hebrew Congregation ) in Port Elizabeth was founded in 1908. Its members came for the most part from the areas of Russia , Lithuania , Latvia and Poland because they were exposed to persecution and pogroms . However, the first Jewish immigrants to Port Elizabeth came from Russia at the end of the 19th century. The Port Elizabeth Orthodox Hebrew Congregation ( Raleigh Street Shul ) merged with the Western Road Hebrew Congregation in 1954 . The latter consisted mostly of members of British and German descent . As a result of the merger of the two communities, the Western Road Synagogue was demolished in 1957 and a new house of worship, the Glendinningvale Synagogue, was built.

museum

Evidence of Jewish life in Port Elizabeth is kept and exhibited in the museum. The collection contains documents relating to Israel's hostage liberation operation at the Ugandan Entebbe airport on July 4, 1976. The museum is run and managed on a voluntary basis. It also serves as a Jewish information center in the region. The museum is financed through donations and bequests as well as donations from the circle of deceased community members.

The exhibits include evidence of the Greyshirts trial. A member of the Greyshirt organization founded in 1933 , Harry Victor Inch, accused the congregation of anti-Christian activities with a forged document. The then parishioner Abraham Levy filed a lawsuit against it. The trial was held in the Eastern Cape Division of the Grahamstown Supreme Court under the direction of Court President Sir Thomas Graham. Inch was sentenced to six years in prison for defamation. The Greyshirt Organization was a fascist organization in South Africa active in the 1930s and 1940s .

Building

The synagogue building was built according to a design by Orlando Middleton in Art Nouveau style with Byzantine architectural references. It was consecrated as a synagogue on Raleigh Street on December 12, 1912 by Rabbi Judah Leo Landau of Johannesburg during the Hanukkah festival . The land required for this on an old market square at the corner of Raleigh and Edward Street was acquired as early as 1908.

The main front of the building is characterized on the upper floor by a series of keyhole windows and a semicircular gable element . The corners of the building emerge through pilaster-like towers, the top of which is formed by a hemisphere. The tower surfaces facing the street are structured with the outline of an oversized keyhole relief. The main entrance is set deep in the building cube and is enclosed by a wide arch in the facade.

The property is surrounded by a simple wall with horizontally arranged semicircular openings, in which an archway enables access to the synagogue's forecourt. The building and the property wall are uniformly whitewashed. Only the hemispherical roofs of the two corner towers, small decorative elements in the facade and two ellipsoids on both sides of the main staircase stand out clearly with their light blue coloring. On the gable are the words of the ancestor Jacob in Hebrew script : "Certainly this is the house of God and these are the gates of heaven". In the center of the writing field there is a Star of David .

To preserve the memory of the early church history, some parishioners bought the no longer used as a synagogue building on Raleigh Street and founded the organization The Synagogue & Youth Foundation . After that, however, the building stood empty for many years and was seriously damaged by fire and looting.

Thanks to an architecture student and with the support of the then University of Port Elizabeth , the dilapidated synagogue was remembered again and was declared a national monument by the South African state . It has been under protection since 1986. The former synagogue is the oldest surviving structure of its kind in the Eastern Cape Province . The second oldest synagogue building in South Africa was the building of the former Western Road community, which was demolished in 1957.

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Coordinates: 33 ° 57 ′ 32.74 "  S , 25 ° 36 ′ 48.13"  E