TuS Hakoah food
The Hakoah Essen gymnastics and sports club was a German-Jewish sports club in Essen that existed from 1923 to 1938.
Club history
The gymnastics and sports club Hakoah Essen was founded in October 1923 and had 470 members in June 1924, and more than 1000 in November 1927. It was supported by the community rabbis Salomon Samuel and Hugo Hahn, who made the community hall available to the club on two evenings posed. The gymnastics department rented the school gym of the Alfredischule in the East Quarter from the city of Essen , and contracts were signed with ETB Schwarz-Weiß Essen and VfB Rellinghausen for the shared use of their sports fields. In October 1924 the first own gym with demonstrations in boxing and gymnastics was opened.
The club did gymnastics, gymnastics, football, athletics, boxing, tennis, table tennis, swimming and fencing, and ski trips to the Sauerland were organized. As early as January 1924, the first edition of the association newspaper "Hakoah-Blätter" appeared, in which local companies could place advertisements. The Jewish community , which did not have its own paper, also had space here for its communications. Other Jewish organizations such as the local branch of Misrachi , the theater association “Hasomir” and the youth hiking association “Kadimah” referred to their activities in the paper. The club management emphasized the political neutrality of the sports club and did not allow any space in the newspaper for the dispute about Zionism . A stylized “H” for “Hakoah” was chosen as the club emblem and deliberately not the Star of David . In July 1924, the German master Erich Rahn held a course in Jiu Jitsu .
The Essen club was a model for a large number of sports clubs in the Ruhr area and in the Rhineland, which got organizational help in Essen. Since the West German Game Association did not include any other clubs in its gaming operations, the Association of Jewish-Neutral Gymnastics and Sports Clubs in West Germany, VINTUS , was founded in April 1925, with its headquarters in Essen, which organized competitions among the Jewish clubs.
After the handover of power to the National Socialists in Germany in 1933, the Jewish members of the "Aryan" sports clubs were initially forced out of the clubs by means of Aryan paragraphs, and in December 1933, Prussian law banned the membership of non-Aryans entirely. A sporting activity was now only possible for them in the Jewish sports clubs, which thereby gained members and increased importance for them. Under political pressure, the associations had to give up their (inner-Jewish) neutrality on the question of Zionism, so the VINTUS member associations joined the German Makkabi Circle by January 1934 . In the Hakoah in Essen, the members of the association took care of cultural and leisure activities, welfare issues, job creation and emigration. The own gym in the Mendelsohn building of the Jewish youth home was temporarily confiscated by the Hitler Youth in 1933 . In 1937, soccer, gymnastics, swimming, athletics and table tennis were still played in the Hakoah, and the boxing department had 70 members.
During the Reichspogromnacht in 1938, the Essen synagogue was set on fire, the youth home destroyed, three members of the TuS Hakoah board of directors were taken into protective custody on November 10 and deported to the Dachau concentration camp on November 16 , including Siegbert Riesenfeld. He was able to emigrate to Great Britain in 1939 and fought as a British soldier in World War II. In 1976 he bequeathed his estate from the Hakoah period in Essen to the Maccabi Museum in Ramat Gan .
literature
- Pasquale Boeti: " Muscle Judaism". The gymnastics and sports club "Hakoah Essen" - a Jewish sports club in the Ruhr area . In: Jan-Pieter Barbian ; Michael Brocke ; Ludger Heid (ed.): Jews in the Ruhr area. From the Age of Enlightenment to the present . Klartext, Essen 1999, ISBN 3-88474-694-4 , pp. 601-617
- Fritz A. Lewinson : Gymnastics and Sports Club Hakoah, Essen, one of the largest Jewish sports clubs, 1923–1938 , in: Hermann Schröter (ed.): History and fate of the Essen Jews: memorial book for the Jewish citizens of the city of Essen . City of Essen, Essen 1980, pp. 283–289
Individual evidence
- ↑ Fritz A. Lewinson, in: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (ed.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Vol. 1: Politics, economy, public life . Saur, Munich 1980, p. 441