Manass Neumark

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Stolperstein Duisburg 500 Altstadt Fuldastraße 14 Manass Neumark.jpg
Stolperstein Duisburg 500 Altstadt Fuldastraße 14 Hulda Neumark.jpg


Stumbling blocks for Manass Neumark and his sister Hulda, Fuldastr. 14 in Duisburg

Manass Neumark (born May 19, 1875 in Posen ; died October 21, 1942 in the Theresienstadt ghetto ) was a liberal German rabbi . He was the first rabbi to work in Duisburg .

biography

Manass Neumark was a son of the merchant Hermann Neumark and his wife Albertine, nee. Ephraim; the family was orthodox . The father died early, an uncle financed his attendance at a high school in Poznan and his first semester of study. Like many Poznan Jews, he felt “decidedly a German”: “He saw Germanness and Judaism as a unit.” But he was also familiar with traditional life in the shtetl and Yiddish .

In 1893 Neumark graduated from high school, followed by half a year of Talmudic studies. From 1893 to 1900 he studied oriental languages , German and philosophy at the University of Berlin , at the Berlin rabbinical seminar and at the Veitel-Heine-Ephraim'schen Lehranstalt . From 1895 he worked as a teacher at the religious school of the Israelite synagogue community Adass Jisroel in Berlin. In 1900 Neumark left the orthodox rabbinical seminary together with 15 colleagues and continued his philological and theological studies privately and as an intern at the College for the Science of Judaism . Until 1903 he worked as a teacher at the X. Religious School of the Jewish Community in Berlin, from 1903 to 1905 he worked as a rabbinical administrator in Görlitz . In January 1905 he passed his rabbi exam before the examination board of the liberal rabbis association. In May of the same year he received his doctorate in Giessen on the subject of lexical investigations into the language of the Jerusalem Pentateuch Targume .

Soon after, Manass Neumark applied for the first advertised position as rabbi of the Jewish community in Duisburg, "for him a completely foreign and new country". At that time the church there had 971 members. In 1905 he started working in Duisburg after he married his cousin Martha (1877-1924), daughter of Abraham Neumark. The couple had four children: Ruth, Eva, Herrmann and Ernst.

The focus of Neumark's work was youth education and social work. During the First World War he worked as a pastor in hospitals and prison camps. Against opposition from his community, he campaigned for the establishment of a municipal Jewish school, which opened in 1927, and gave Hebrew lessons there himself . He was involved in numerous associations: For example, he was a member of the Association of Liberal Rabbis in Germany , in 1912 co-signer of the guidelines for a program for liberal Judaism , from 1910 chairman of the Rhenish Rabbis Association , chairman of the Association for Jewish History and Literature in Duisburg and Chairman of the local branch of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith , "an organization that is decidedly inclined to Germanness". Until 1933 he taught religion and Hebrew at Steinbart-Gymnasium .

When he took office in Duisburg, Manass Neumark was confronted with problems between the local, liberal "Western Jews" and the Orthodox "Eastern Jews" who had come to Duisburg in the past few decades. Liberal, but still tied to tradition, he was committed to building bridges between the two groups, whose conflict "caused a considerable stir far beyond the city limits". The newly arrived Eastern Jews formed the majority in the community over the years, and their influence on the design of the services, their external conspicuousness and their language led some adapted "Western Jews" to distance themselves from the community. In 1909 Neumark appealed in a "warning to the community" to their solidarity and urged them not - as threatened - to leave the community. The Eastern Jewish community, which had grown to around 1,500 people by 1920, founded its own association Machsika Hadas within the Jewish community; its head ( Dajan ) became the rabbinate assessor Markus Bereisch . Manass Neumark attended the inauguration of their Shabbat district ( Eruv ) in 1929 .

In 1924 Neumark's wife Martha died. She was buried in Duisburg in the Jewish cemetery of the Sternbuschweg communal cemetery. Then his sister Hulda ran the household for him.

Neumark's colleague Max Eschelbacher from Düsseldorf wrote on the occasion of his 25th anniversary in office in 1930: “He has been given the crown of the pure heart. But in this kind, loving man lives at the same time a keen, clear spirit, a tireless energy, a great practical skill and an unusual gift for organization. "

Even before the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, Neumark turned against anti-Semitism . For example, at an event with the philosopher Julius Goldstein in 1920, he successfully opposed a group of rioting anti-Semites. On March 18, 1933, the Dayan Markus Bereisch was mistreated by five SS men (Bereisch later called them messengers of hell in a report ) and a week later he was driven through the city together with other Jews in front of around 1,000 onlookers. He was verbally abused and beaten, his hair was pulled out and thrown to the audience, and his beard was set on fire. Bereisch was able to save himself from his tormentors in the parish hall in Neumark. His degrading treatment was captured in a photo that was published and sparked international outrage. Since reports mentioned a "Duisburg rabbi", Christian clergymen reported to Neumark, concerned, because they thought it was him. He replied that there was an error “in the person but not in the matter”. Bereisch fled to Switzerland and successfully applied for a rabbi in Zurich, where Neumark recommended him. He worked there for 40 years.

In 1936 Neumark made a trip to Palestine that his community had given him for his 60th birthday. His initially rather critical attitude towards Zionism had changed due to anti-Semitic politics in Germany. In Palestine, he visited community members who had emigrated; he did not take the advice to stay there. He is "where he works as a rabbi, especially at this time more indispensable than ever".

During the November pogroms in 1938 , the Duisburg synagogue on Junkernstrasse, prayer rooms in Hamborn and Ruhrort and the Jewish mortuary were destroyed by fire. Neumark's apartment on Fuldastr. 4 in the Wasserviertel was devastated and he himself was briefly taken into “ protective custody ”. From July 1942 he lived with his sister Hulda in the “ Judenhaus ” on Baustraße 2 in Meiderich .

On July 24, 1942, Hulda and Manass Neumark were deported to Theresienstadt together with the last members of his community . Neumark died there after three months, his sister survived him almost a year. His body was cremated and the ashes dumped in the Eger in November 1944 . Four of his seven siblings were also killed in the Holocaust . His four children Ruth, Eva, Hermann and Ernst survived the Nazi period by emigrating and fleeing.

His son Hermann ( Yehoshua Amir ) was visiting professor at Duisburg University in the 1970s and 1980s . His grandson Yehoyada Amir also works as a university lecturer and taught at Berlin's Humboldt University .

memories

Street sign for Rabbiner-Neumark-Weg 51 ° 26 ′ 7.4 ″  N , 6 ° 45 ′ 56.8 ″  E

The tomb for Martha Neumark in the Jewish cemetery, like all the other stones in the field (37a), was sold to a stonemason in 1943 and used again. During a visit to Duisburg in the summer of 1952, her daughter Eva Frank applied to the city for a replacement for the lost stone and left a 1934 photo of the original tombstone as well as a template for its inscription according to the old stone. Later she wrote to ask for the memory of her father to be added. According to the son Israel Neumark, the original stone is said to have been the work of the artist Leopold Fleischhacker .

In 1984 a path along the city ​​wall in Duisburg's old town was named after Manass Neumark Rabbiner-Neumark-Weg . Along this path there is a memorial in memory of the Duisburg synagogue and the victims of persecution by the National Socialists by the Hanoverian artist Hans-Jürgen Breuste . In front of Neumark's house at Fuldastraße 14 there are stumbling blocks for him and his sister. A private person, a former art teacher at Steinbart-Gymnasium, created two concrete sculptures in the form of the heads of Neumark and his companion Sally Kaufmann , the chairman of the Jewish community, and put them on the wall of his house.

Fonts

  • Lexical investigations into the language of the Jerusalem Pentateuch Targume. Dissertation Berlin. Giessen 1905.

literature

  • Julius Carlebach, Michael Brocke (Hrsg.): Biographisches Handbuch der Rabbis. The rabbis in the German Empire 1871–1945 . tape 2 . De Gruyter, 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-048569-1 , p. 455-456 .
  • Ludger Heid : "Resilient pastor with cheerful equanimity". The Duisburg Rabbi Manass Neumark . In: Jan-Pieter Barbian, Michael Brocke, Ludger Heid (eds.): Jews in the Ruhr area . Klartext, Essen 1999, ISBN 3-88474-694-4 , p. 47-66 .
  • Ludger J. Heid : Eastern Jews in Duisburg. Citizens, petty bourgeois, proletarians. History of a Jewish minority in the Ruhr area . Klartext, Essen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8375-0536-8 .
  • Günter von Roden: History of the Duisburg Jews (=  Duisburg research . Volume 34 ). tape 1 + 2 . Walter Braun, Duisburg 1986, ISBN 3-87096-045-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Carlebach / Brocke, Handbook of Rabbis .
  2. ↑ Heid, Ostjuden , p. 293.
  3. ^ Carlebach / Brocke, Handbook of Rabbis .
  4. ↑ a b c d Heid, Manass Neumark , p. 50.
  5. ↑ Heid, Manass Neumark , p. 54.
  6. ^ Carlebach / Brocke, Handbook of Rabbis .
  7. ^ Von Roden, History of the Duisburg Jews , p. 993.
  8. ^ Carlebach / Brocke, Handbook of Rabbis .
  9. ↑ a b von Roden, History of the Duisburg Jews , p. 994.
  10. ^ Carlebach / Brocke, Handbook of Rabbis .
  11. ^ Carlebach / Brocke, Handbook of Rabbis .
  12. ↑ Heid, Ostjuden , p. 299ff.
  13. ↑ Heid, Manass Neumark , p. 51f.
  14. ↑ a b Elfi Pracht-Jörns: Jüdische Lebenswelten in Rheinland. Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar, 2011, ISBN 978-3-412-20674-1 , p. 170 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  15. ↑ a b Salomon Ludwig: Database: Jüdische Gravestonepigraphik. In: steinheim-institut.de. November 14, 1924. Retrieved October 25, 2017 .
  16. ↑ Heid, Wehrhafter Seelsorger , p.?.
  17. ↑ Heid, Manass Neumark , pp. 55f.
  18. ↑ Heid, Manass Neumark , p. 57f.
  19. ↑ a b Heid, Manass Neumark , p. 60.
  20. ↑ Heid, Manass Neumark , pp. 58f.
  21. ↑ Heid, Manass Neumark , p. 62.
  22. ↑ Heid, Manass Neumark , p. 63.
  23. ↑ Heid, Manass Neumark , p. 64.
  24. ↑ Yehoyada Amir: Professor Rabbi Yehoyada Amir. Narrative résumé. Hebrew Union College, accessed November 10, 2017 . (pdf)
  25. ^ Art in public space: an iron cage with an exit to the future. In: Rp Online. July 8, 2016, accessed November 5, 2017 .
  26. ↑ Fabienne Piepiora: A memorial for old neighbors. In: waz.de. November 28, 2013, accessed November 5, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Neumark, Manass
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German rabbi
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Poses
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 1942
Place of death Theresienstadt ghetto