Mikveh in Friedberg (Hesse)
The mikvah in Friedberg (Hesse) is the largest complete and one of the few medieval large mikvahs in Germany that has survived. It is also known as the Judenbad .
Location
The Friedberger Mikwe is located in the old town of Friedberg, at Judengasse 20, in the former Jewish quarter. Access to the mikvah is via the inner courtyard of the front building from 1902. In this courtyard there is a plexiglass dome that today covers the light shaft in the vaulted ceiling of the mikveh. The synagogue stood just a few houses away until it was destroyed in 1938 .
history
A Jewish community in Friedberg has been documented since 1241 . The construction of the mikveh began by 1260 at the latest. The stylistic dating also points to this time. The technically highly demanding building was erected by the same construction hut that was working on the town church at the same time . Isaak Coblenz is considered to have financed the construction project because of a Hebrew inscription that mentions his name. It is located on a square to the left of the inflow. The oldest written mention of the mikveh comes from the year 1350, when Ulrich III. von Hanau , bailiff of the Wetterau - and thus representative of the king - sold numerous Jewish property to the city of Friedberg after the persecution of Jews.
Since the beginning of the 19th century and the closure of the ghetto in the course of the French Revolution, the mikveh was no longer used as a ritual bath and was misused. It received scientific attention from around 1875, when the Jewish community bought back the cultural monument , which was now in private hands. It has now been recognized, researched and opened to visitors in terms of monument preservation . In 1902/03 it was fundamentally renovated for the first time after water penetrated the building. At the same time, the historicist-Gothic style front building was built, which still provides access from the street today.
During the Nazi era , there were attempts to destroy the mikveh. During the November pogroms in 1938 , this failed due to the resistance of a history teacher from the Friedberger Aufbaugymnasium and his students, who convincingly demonstrated the historical significance of the bath to the advancing SA troops. Later, leading Nazi politicians campaigned for the preservation of the mikveh because it was built by Christian German craftsmen. In 1939 the Jewish community was forced to transfer the mikveh to the city of Friedberg. It is still owned by them and is open to visitors. The city repaired the system again in 1957/58, and in 1998 a room for didactic explanations was added to the entrance area.
Meaning and function
The Friedberger Judenbad is the largest preserved medieval mikveh in Europe, probably worldwide. Due to the elaborate, elegant architectural design in Gothic forms, the mikveh can also claim an outstanding position in architectural terms. Interested parties became aware of this early on: Thomas Carve visited them as early as the Thirty Years War . The mikveh has been a cultural monument since 1903, at that time due to the monument protection law relating to the Grand Duchy of Hesse from July 16, 1902, today due to the Hessian Monument Protection Act . The Frankfurt writer Valentin Senger dealt with the history of the Friedberg mikveh in his book "The Women's Bath and Other Jewish Stories" ( ISBN 3-630-86839-8 ).
architecture
The technical execution of the mikveh is complex: In order to get to the "natural" water required for the ritual baths, here the groundwater , a shaft first had to be driven 25 meters vertically through the basalt rock on which Friedberg stands. This was then lined with a square cross-section of approx. 5.50 m × 5.50 m. The water, which is constantly renewing itself, is up to 5 m deep. The water temperature is 7.5 ° C. The shaft is closed at the top by a barrel vault in which a circular opening with an octagonal structure was cut out as a light source. The only access, accessible from the courtyard down a short staircase, is a portal, richly profiled and finished with a combination of shoulder arch and Gothic three-leaf blind arch at the top. From there, the shaft can be accessed via a staircase that is in front of the outer shaft wall inwards. This aesthetically extremely remarkable stone staircase consists of seven sections, which, interrupted by steps in the corners, lead over a total of more than seventy steps, some of them very high, to the visible rocky ground below the water level. The last two flights of stairs are usually under water. These flights of stairs are spanned by wide semi-arches, which at the same time support the masonry above them as the inner shaft wall. Its load is reduced by ogival niches, which at the same time structure the wall surfaces in an aesthetically effective way and underline the vertical alignment of the building. The half-arches are carried towards the interior of the room at their foot points by columns that stand on the free corners of the landing. Towards the outer shaft wall, the arches weigh on the consoles and corner services .
The capitals of the columns show differently differentiated foliage, some of which are similar to those of the ciborium of the Friedberg town church . Similar stonemason marks as in the choir of the town church begun around 1260 and the use of the same sandstone as building material are an indication that both buildings date from the same time and that the same craftsmen were active on both construction sites. An inscription in a wall niche of the mikveh shows the year 1260, which confirms the stylistic and material connection to the city's Gothic sacred building.
weathering
The sandstone used in the mikveh shows considerable signs of weathering on its surface . This manifests itself in salt efflorescence , salt crusts, sanding and flaking and is essentially due to the cyclically recurring and climatically-related dissolution of salts on the surface and in the pore space near the surface. Cracks and cavities only appear in isolated cases. The reason for this is seen in the restoration work in 1902 and 1957. The plaster used brought numerous water-soluble sodium salts into the building material.
literature
- Thea Altaras : The Jewish ritual immersion bath and: Synagogues in Hesse - What happened since 1945? Part II . Koenigstein i. Ts. 1994, ISBN 3-7845-7792-X , pp. 149f.
- Georg Dehio : Handbook of the German art monuments - Hesse II. Administrative region Darmstadt . (Ed .: Folkhard Cremer et al.), 3rd edition, Munich 2008. ISBN 978-3-422-03117-3 , p. 328.
- Stefanie Fuchs: The Friedberger Mikveh in an art-historical comparison . In: INSITU 9 (2017/1), pp. 5–14.
- Monica Kingreen: The Judenbad and Judengasse in Friedberg - A microcosm of Jewish life and German-Jewish history of more than 750 years . Wetterauer history sheets No. 56/2007, Friedberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-87076-102-8 , ISSN 0508-6213
- J. Legrum: Investigations to clarify the sandstone weathering in the Judenbad zu Friedberg in Hessen. In: Commission for keeping the air clean in the VDI and DIN: Materials in their environment. VDI-Verlag Düsseldorf 1993, ISBN 3-18-091060-7 , pp. 373-382.
Web links
- Mikveh in Friedberg (website of the State Office for Monument Preservation)
- Visit to the medieval mikveh in Friedberg on DFG Science TV
- Report on the medieval mikveh in Friedberg in the report from Hessischer Rundfunk
Individual evidence
- ^ Dehio, p. 328.
- ↑ Hans-Helmut Hoos: Kehillah Kedoscha - Search for traces - On the history of the Jewish community in Friedberg and the Friedberg Jews from the beginning until 1942 . Limburg 2002, ISBN 3-927006-36-X , p. 24
- ↑ Fuchs, p. 14.
- ↑ Altaras, p. 149.
- ↑ Kingreen, p. 43.
- ↑ Kingreen, pp. 50-52.
- ↑ Kingreen, p. 45.
- ↑ Thomas Carve: Itinerarium RD Thomae Carve Tipperariensis, Sacellani majoris in fortissima juxta et nobilissima legione strictuissimi Colonelli DW Devereux . 3 vols. Vol. 1 u. 2: Mainz 1639, 1641. Vol. 3: Speyer 1648. ND Vol. 1-3: London 1859.
- ↑ Altaras, p. 149.
- ↑ Altaras, p. 149.
- ^ Dehio, p. 328.
Coordinates: 50 ° 20 ′ 21.6 ″ N , 8 ° 45 ′ 18.5 ″ E