Synagogue (Ettlingen)

Synagogue in Ettlingen, around 1895

The synagogue in Ettlingen , a town in the Karlsruhe district in Baden-Württemberg , was built in 1888/89 and destroyed in 1938.

history

Jews lived in Ettlingen as early as the 14th century . Nothing is known about their institutions during this period. Information about a prayer room of the Jewish community in Ettlingen was only available in the middle of the 18th century. In 1742 she owned a prayer room at Albstraße 31 / corner of Färbergasse ( Judengasse ).

In 1848/49 the Jewish community set up a synagogue in an old tanner's house opposite the St. Martin's parsonage. The synagogue became too small for the increasing number of members of the Jewish community, which is why a new building was decided. The plans for the synagogue built in 1888/89 in today's Pforzheimer Straße 33 were made by the future city architect Alexander Kiefer.

On October 6, 1889, the synagogue was handed over to its intended use by Rabbi Baruch Mayer, who was the district rabbi in Bühl .

architecture

The stone construction had elements of the Renaissance style . The facade had a vertical tripartite division, in that two corner risers with domed roofs framed the central part. The corner projections, with highlighted corner cuboids on the ground floor, had two written tablets on the upper floor, on which command panels and psalms were written in Hebrew . The entrance portal led into a vestibule from which one came into the prayer room reserved for men. On the left side of the vestibule a staircase led to the women's galleries . At the front was the Torah shrine and in front of it the raised bima . The large three-part facade window and a four-part window above the Torah shrine lit up the relatively small room. The synagogue was 8.5 meters wide and about 10 meters long and was lower than the neighboring houses.

time of the nationalsocialism

During the November pogroms in 1938 , the synagogue was set on fire by Siegfried Line workers . The ruins had to be removed at the expense of the Jewish community in 1939 and then the city of Ettlingen bought the property on which a residential and commercial building was built after 1945.

Commemoration

In 1966 a memorial plaque in memory of the synagogue was attached to the house. This was replaced by a new plaque with a view of the synagogue.

literature

Joachim Hahn and Jürgen Krüger : Synagogues in Baden-Württemberg . Volume 2: Joachim Hahn: Places and Facilities . Theiss, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-8062-1843-5 , pp. 121–124 ( Memorial Book of Synagogues in Germany . Volume 4).
Franz-Josef Ziwes (Ed.): Baden synagogues from the time of Grand Duke Friedrich I in contemporary photographs . G. Braun, Karlsruhe 1997, ISBN 3-7650-8177-9 , pp. 50-51.