Synagogue community Saar

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Main facade of the synagogue in Saarbrücken

The Saar Synagogue Community is the Jewish community in Saarbrücken and a corporation under public law . It was created after the Second World War as a replacement for the former 26 Jewish communities in Saarland and with around 1,100 members is one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany.

history

Creation of the Jewish community

Prince Ludwig von Nassau-Saarbrücken permitted the settlement of Jews in his domain for the first time. In Ottweiler and Neunkirchen , so-called protection Jews who came from Illingen , Münchweiler and Kusel were admitted for an annual fee of 20 guilders . The settled Jews had to have an impeccable way of life and 1500 guilders in cash as well as acquire a house with a garden, meadows and farmland. In return, they were exempt from personal duties , compulsory labor and other burdens. Prince Ludwig gave the Jews permission to trade, slaughter cattle, bury their dead in special cemeteries and hold church services in their private homes. Ludwig later allowed them to walk across the street with music at Jewish weddings. At the end of the 1780s there were 9 Jewish families in Ottweiler, 16 in Neunkirchen, 2 in Uchtelfangen , and one each in Spiesen and Wiebelskirchen.

Ludwig's father, Wilhelm Heinrich von Nassau-Saarbrücken , categorically banned all economic activity by Jews from Lorraine , the free imperial rule Illingen and the rule Von der Leyen zu Blieskastel in 1754 . In addition, the Nassau-Saarbrückischen subjects were forbidden from any borrowing from Jews by the prince. From 1764 all contracts with Jews had to be reported administratively. Strict rules have also been adopted for lending.

However, Prince Ludwig's freedom of settlement for Jews did not last long. The Saarbrücken merchants opposed the prince's pro-Jews policy and paid a considerable sum to the princely treasury, which meant that all Jews were expelled from the princely domain.

Development of the Jewish community in Vormärz

Only after the French occupation of the Saarbrücken rule were Jews allowed to resettle. In 1808 there were 58 Jews in Saarbrücken, in 1830 about 90. By 1848 the number of Jewish residents had fallen to 34. This number development was related to the right of residence for Jews, which in turn was linked to the granting of a trade permit. In 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte had legally made the trading activities of Jews dependent on the granting of patents. Even after Saarbrücken was handed over to the Kingdom of Prussia , this ordinance remained in force. Every trading Jew had to acquire this patent every year. In 1817 the Saarbrücken city council rejected the application of a Jew to settle down as a trader, since there were already more Jews in the area than would be reasonable. So it came about that numerous sons of the Jews living in Saarbrücken emigrated to France or the Rhineland.

During the pre-March phase, the attitude of the local government towards the Jewish question began to change. On December 11th, 1844, Saarbrücken's mayor Ludwig Wagner approached District Administrator Christian Salomon Friedrich Hesse with the request to use the Prussian government to abolish the annual Jewish trade patent. The background to this development was that St. Johann was increasingly becoming a trading center for the surrounding region, and Jews from the region founded important local businesses. Often, however, Saarbrücken and St. Johann were only stations within the lives of the trading Jews and there was no permanent settlement of a cross-generational kind.

Jews had to determine their family names since the Napoleonic period. Many of them discarded their Jewish names. In 1837, the Saarbrücken member of the Prussian Provincial Parliament of the Rhine Province , Johann Carl Schmidtborn , together with a total of eight members of the Estates Assembly in Düsseldorf, submitted an application for the emancipation of the Jews. Although the proposal did not find a majority overall, the issue remained on the political agenda.

A few years later, in May 1843, 181 Saarbrücken citizens submitted a collective petition to the Rhenish Provincial Parliament for civil equality for Jews. In the letter it was argued that since the Nassau settlement ban in the 18th century, a fundamental change of time had taken place. The "great idea of ​​the innate human right which time (has) brought to consciousness" has now become valid. The sense of justice forbids letting people with the same abilities and claims live semi-dishonorously and without rights. The matter was discussed in various articles in the "Saarbrücker Anzeiger" and served as a template for Ludwig Heinrich Röchling (1796–1870), member of the state parliament, on May 26, 1843. Röchling campaigned for the emancipation of the Jews at the 7th Provincial Parliament in Düsseldorf with liberal politicians from other Rhenish cities. On July 16, 1843, 54 against 19 members of parliament voted for the preparation of complete equality for the Jews. In 1845, the new municipal code for the Rhine Province was finally passed.

The Jewish community in the second half of the 19th century

In 1860 there were 18 families in the Jewish community, in 1877 there were 60 families, in 1890 there were 90 Jewish families. The whole district counted 550 Jews. Before the First World War , 250 Jewish families with 1,250 people lived in the Saarbrücken district and 25 families with 100 people in the district. The Jews held their services in a prayer room.

During the 50 years before Hitler's so-called seizure of power in 1933, the synagogue community in St. Johann and Saarbrücken had developed from humble beginnings into an institution to which more than half of all Saarland Jews belonged with over 2,000 members at the end of the 1920s. The outward sign of the position achieved was the synagogue of the Saarbrücken Jews on the corner of Futterstrasse 25 and Kaiserstrasse in St. Johann, built between 1888 and 1890 according to plans by the Saarbrücken architect Friedrich Mertz in the Moorish style .

Time of National Socialism and Reichskristallnacht

The violent events of the "Reichskristallnacht" in Saarbrücken were mainly the work of the local SS units of Standard 85. The order for violent attacks on the Jewish community came at short notice on the evening of November 9, 1938. The by their leaders for the implementation of the Men selected by the action had to put on civilian clothes and were then divided into four teams. One of them was intended for use at the synagogue in St. Johann, the other three troops were supposed to hunt down Jewish residents. These were then torn from their beds, mistreated and threatened with death. Your home furnishings were devastated. Around 130–150 Jewish men were driven through the city center at night, some in light clothing and some in their sleepwear, spat at, insulted and sprayed with water from the city's explosive device. In a symbolic action, the men were asked to dig their own grave at the construction site of the neoclassical railway management at Saarbrücken main station . From Schlossplatz , where the Saarbrücken Gestapo authority was located, the train finally went to the prison on the Lerchesflur .

There, swastikas were smeared on the faces of the men with paint and the seal stamp of the Jewish Community of Saarbrücken was pressed on their faces. Most of the men in the Jewish community were then sent to the concentration camp in Dachau for several weeks .

On the night of the anti-Jewish attacks, a group of around 30 SS men broke into the synagogue, ravaged the interior, tore up the prayer books and desecrated the cult objects. The captured Jewish men were also led past the synagogue on their humiliating procession through Saarbrücken. There they were forced to dance, gesticulating, kneeling down in prayer and singing Hebrew songs. Then the sacred building was set on fire. The fire brigade summoned only protected the neighboring houses threatened by the flames and allowed the synagogue to burn down. The Saarbrücker Zeitung commented on the arson of the synagogue on November 11, 1938:

“With his cowardly murder on the German delegation councilor vom Rath, a Jewish kid set the whole German public in boiling excitement and yesterday morning this heat seemed to have spread to the synagogue in Kaiserstrasse. In any case, yesterday morning at around 8 o'clock in the morning the flames struck from the onion dome, which and the building underneath had never fit into our cityscape. Soon a large crowd had gathered in Kaiser- und Futterstrasse, and they were watching the further course of events with great tension. No one could hide the satisfaction that the house, in which the Jewish clique had still been able to gather undisturbed, was now disappearing. Wasn't it like a symbol when the Jewish star, which had still boldly stared at the German sky on the highest point, suddenly fell burning through the crackling and sparkling beams! Isn't it crackling in the framework of international Judaism, whose star is also sinking, even if one doesn't want it to be true in some places. The crowd in the streets gave way and did not sway. One wanted to experience how the dome collapsed, one wanted to be there when this outward sign of alien ethnicity and alien mentality was erased from the German cityscape.

The fact that a search was being carried out in the Jewish house next to the synagogue and that all kinds of more or less valuable material were brought out served for general amusement and was duly applauded. So the old proverb has come true with us too; "Who sows wind, will reap storm." "

After the Second World War

After the Jewish sacred building fell victim to the National Socialist fire in 1938 and was demolished in 1939, efforts were made by the Saarland state government under Prime Minister Johannes Hoffmann (politician, 1890) and the French occupying power under the representative of the French government, Gilbert Grandval , of Jewish origin to provide a new synagogue to the newly founded synagogue community of Saar on June 2, 1946 by 40 surviving Jews in the Saarbrücken town hall festival hall .

Assemblies and services were held in Saarbrücken, which was badly damaged by the war, in the immediate post-war period on working days in a room in the State Museum (now the City Gallery) and on public holidays in the Red Hall of the Johannishof in Mainzer Straße. In August 1947, the Saarbrücken architect Heinrich Sievers (1903–1969) presented a first draft for a new synagogue. This draft was approved by the Jewish community, the Saarland state government and the French occupying power, but was initially rejected by the city's expert committee for new buildings. Only after extensive corrections could a new synagogue with 248 seats be built on Beethovenplatz in Lortzingstrasse between 1948 and 1951. The Saarbrücken synagogue is the earliest post-war synagogue in what is now Germany.

Since 1993 there have been negotiations on a state treaty between the synagogue community and the Saarland, which was signed in Saarbrücken on November 14, 2001, approved by the state parliament on February 6, 2002 and came into force in the same year. The state treaty provides for financial support for the Saar synagogue community. It also contains a regulation according to which Jews can keep their holidays in the future. The first term of the contract was five years, but was automatically extended.

synagogue

A first synagogue was built at the end of the 1880s on the property at Futterstraße 25 at the corner of Kaiserstraße 12 based on designs by architects Friedrich Mertz and Heinrich Güth . This was devastated and set on fire during the violent events of the Reichskristallnacht . The ruin was demolished the following year. From 1948 to 1951, a new synagogue was built on Beethovenplatz in Lortzingstrasse based on plans by Heinrich Sievers.

Web links

literature

  • Hans-Walter Herrmann: The fate of the Jews in Saarland 1920 to 1945, in: Documentation on the history of the Jewish population in Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland from 1800 to 1945, ed. by the State Archives Administration Rhineland-Palatinate in connection with the State Archives Saarbrücken, Volume 6, Koblenz 1974.
  • Fritz Jacoby: Jewish families in the Saar cities in the first half of the 19th century, in: Saarländische Familienkunde, Vol. 5, 1984–1987, pp. 229–240.
  • Fritz Jacoby: Two statements on the emancipation of Jews from the Saar cities, The petition of the citizens of Saarbrücken, St. Johann and the surrounding area of ​​1843, in: Journal for the history of the Saar region, 33, 1985, pp. 122-147.
  • Walter Kasel: The Jewish community, in: Saarbrücken, 50 years of the city 1909–1959, Saarbrücken 1959, pp. 226–231.
  • Cilli Kasper-Holtkotte: Jews on the move, On the social history of a minority in the Saar-Mosel area around 1800, Hanover 1996.
  • Landesarchivverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz and Landesarchiv Saarbrücken (ed.), Documentation on the history of the Jewish population in Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland from 1800 to 1945, 9 volumes, Koblenz 1972ff.
  • State capital Saarbrücken, Department for Education, Culture and Science and Institute for Current Art (Ed.): Competitions Art in Public Space, Saarland, 7, Rabbiner-Rülf-Platz Memorial, Saarbrücken with the sculpture group "The Interrupted Forest" by Ariel Auslender, Saarbrücken 2015.
  • Albert Marx: The history of the Jews on the Saar, From the Ancien Régime to the Second World War, Saarbrücken 1992.
  • Albert Marx: The Jewish community of Saarbrücken (1933–1945), in: Stadtverband Saarbrücken, Regionalhistorisches Museum (ed.), Ten instead of a thousand years, The time of National Socialism on the Saar (1933–1945), catalog for the exhibition of the Regional History Museum in Saarbrücker Schloß, Saarbrücken 1988, pp. 201-217.
  • Eva Tigmann: "What happened on November 9, 1938?", A documentation about the crimes against the Jewish population in Saarland in November 1938, Saarbrücken 1998, pp. 74–83.
  • Hans-Georg Treib: "Now the Jews are Schläh!", The "Reichskristallnacht" 1938, in: Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Gerhard Paul, Ralph Schock , Reinhard Klektiven (eds.): We were never right at home, voyages of discovery to the Saar area in 1815 –1955, Bonn 1987.
  • Rolf Wittenbrock: The three Saar cities in the time of the accelerated urban growth (1860-1908), in: Ders. (Ed.): History of the City of Saarbrücken, Vol. 2, Saarbrücken 1999, pp. 11–129, here pp. 112f.
  • Dieter Wolfanger: The fate of the Saarland Jews under Nazi rule, St. Ingbert 1992.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Francophil: Saarbrücken - The parish with charm , Jüdische Allgemeine
  2. ^ Fritz Jacoby: Jewish families in the Saar cities in the first half of the 19th century, in: Saarländische Familienkunde, Vol. 5, 1984–1987, pp. 229–240.
  3. ^ Fritz Jacoby: Two statements on the emancipation of Jews from the Saarstädten, The petition of the citizens of Saarbrücken, St. Johann and the surrounding area of ​​1843, in: Journal for the history of the Saar region, 33, 1985, pp 122-147.
  4. ↑ Albert Marx: The History of the Jews in Saarland from the Ancien Régime to the Second World War, Saarbrücken 1992, pp. 85f.
  5. ↑ Dieter Kastner: The Rhenish Provincial Parliament and the Emancipation of the Jews in the Rhineland 1825–1845 (documents and representations on the history of the Rhenish provincial administration and the Rhineland Regional Council, 2/2), Düsseldorf 1989, pp. 43, 45, 246–249, 827-829, 849.
  6. ^ Albert Ruppersberg : History of the former county of Saarbrücken. Revised and expanded after Friedrich and Adolf Köllner. 3 parts in 4 volumes. III. Part, 2nd volume: History of the cities of Saarbrücken and St. Johann from 1815 to 1909, of the city of Malstatt-Burbach and the unified city of Saarbrücken up to 1914, pp. 554–555 as well as vol. II, p. 261 and p. 304, III, 1, p. 280.
  7. ^ Albert Marx: The Jewish community Saarbrücken (1933-1945), in: Ten instead of a thousand years, The time of National Socialism on the Saar 1935-1945, catalog for the exhibition of the Regional History Museum in Saarbrücken Castle, Saarbrücken 1988, pp. 201-217
  8. ^ Archives Yad Vashem, Jerusalem TR 10/361
  9. ^ Albert Marx: The Jewish Community Saarbrücken (1933-1945) . In: Ten instead of a thousand years, The time of National Socialism on the Saar 1935-1945 . Catalog for the exhibition of the Regional History Museum in Saarbrücken Castle, Saarbrücken 1988, pp. 201–217
  10. ↑ Article "The Saarbrücker Synagoge in Flames", Saarbrücker Zeitung, November 11, 1938.
  11. ↑ Hans-Peter Schwarz (ed.): The architecture of the synagogue, catalog for the exhibition from November 11, 1988-12. February 1989, Deutsches Architekturmuseum Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart 1988, p. 340.
  12. ↑ Bastian Müller: Architecture of the Post-War Period in Saarland Preservation of Monuments in Saarland Volume 4, Landesdenkmalamt, Ministry for the Environment, Energy and Transport, Saarbrücken, 2011, p. 150
  13. ↑ Axel Böcker: The new synagogue and the community center in Saarbrücken Lortzingstrasse 8, in: “and this is the gate of heaven” 1. Mos. 28.17, Synagogues Rhineland-Palatinate-Saarland, edited by Stefan Fischbach and Ingrid Westerhoff, editors Joachim Glatz and Meier Schwarz, ed. from the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Rhineland-Palatinate with the State Conservatory Office of the Saarland and the Synagogue Memorial Jerusalem, Mainz 2005, pp. 454–455.
  14. ↑ Contract between Saarland and the Saar synagogue community - corporation under public law dated November 14, 2001 (Official Journal p. 527), as well as Approval Act No. 1489 dated February 6, 2002 (Official Journal p. 526)
  15. ^ Archives Yad Vashem, Jerusalem TR 10/361
  16. ^ Albert Marx: The Jewish Community Saarbrücken (1933-1945) . In: Ten instead of a thousand years, The time of National Socialism on the Saar 1935-1945 . Catalog for the exhibition of the Regional History Museum in Saarbrücken Castle, Saarbrücken 1988, pp. 201–217
  17. ↑ Bastian Müller: Architecture of the Post-War Period in Saarland Preservation of Monuments in Saarland Volume 4, Landesdenkmalamt, Ministry for the Environment, Energy and Transport, Saarbrücken, 2011, p. 150
  18. ↑ Axel Böcker: The new synagogue and the community center in Saarbrücken Lortzingstrasse 8, in: “and this is the gate of heaven” 1. Mos. 28.17, Synagogues Rhineland-Palatinate-Saarland, edited by Stefan Fischbach and Ingrid Westerhoff, editors Joachim Glatz and Meier Schwarz, ed. from the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Rhineland-Palatinate with the State Conservatory Office of the Saarland and the Synagogue Memorial Jerusalem, Mainz 2005, pp. 454–455.

Coordinates: 49 ° 14 ′ 12.8 "  N , 6 ° 59 ′ 46.4"  E