Westend Synagogue

West End Synagogue from Southwest, March 2012

The Westend Synagogue , built between 1908 and 1910, is the largest synagogue in Frankfurt am Main and the spiritual center of the city's Jewish community life. It was the only one of the four large synagogues that was badly damaged to survive the November pogroms of 1938 and the bombing raids of World War II . It served the liberal reform wing as a place of worship until the fall of Jewish life in Frankfurt during the Nazi era . After a temporary renovation, it was re-inaugurated in 1950 and faithfully restored from 1989 to 1994.

history

After the ghetto was lifted in 1806, the wealthy among the Frankfurt Jews left the former Judengasse with its cramped, unsanitary living conditions. While they initially mainly settled in the eastern inner city and in the Ostend , from around 1860 many who belonged to the liberal bourgeoisie moved to the newly created Westend .

In 1908 the construction of a synagogue began on Freiherr-vom-Stein-Strasse. The plans for the Art Nouveau building with Assyrian-Egyptian echoes came from the architect Franz Roeckle , a later NSDAP member. The actual synagogue building on Altkönigstrasse with its representative dome was inaugurated on September 28, 1910. It was the fourth large synagogue in Frankfurt and the first outside the historic city walls. In contrast to the orthodox synagogues, where women only had access to the gallery, the interior was equally accessible to men and women. However, the rows of seats were separated by sex, with the right half of the synagogue reserved for men and the left half for women. There was space for a total of 1,600 visitors in the interior and on the gallery. This made the Westend synagogue the second largest synagogue in Frankfurt after the strictly Orthodox synagogue on Friedberger Anlage .

At right angles to the synagogue, along Freiherr-vom-Stein-Strasse, was a one-story vestibule that enclosed a small inner courtyard. In the wing of the building on the corner of Freiherr-vom-Stein-Strasse and Friedrichstrasse there were ancillary and administrative rooms, a small weekday synagogue, assembly rooms and apartments for caretakers and rabbis.

The Westend Synagogue received an organ as early as 1909 , built by the organ building company EF Walcker from Ludwigsburg. The instrument had 46 stops on three manual works and a pedal . The playing and stop actions were electric. In 1938 the instrument was destroyed.

On November 10, 1938, during the November pogroms, a group of SA men forcibly gained entry against the resistance of the Christian caretaker and set fire to the interior. Unlike the other synagogues in Frankfurt, the rushing fire brigade extinguished the fire instead of restricting itself to preventing it from spreading to neighboring buildings. As a result, the synagogue was the only one in Frankfurt to be preserved, although the roof and the interior were badly damaged by the fire and the synagogue was unusable.

Until the destruction of the Jewish community

Immediately after the fire, the terror against the Jewish community continued. The liberal rabbi of the Westend Synagogue, Georg Salzberger, was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp . After his release in April 1939 he managed to emigrate to England, where he became rabbi of the German-speaking Jewish community in London.

In the so-called Jewish contract of April 3, 1939, the Jewish community of Frankfurt was forced to sell all of its properties to the city of Frankfurt at a price that was far below their value. The demolition costs of the destroyed synagogues, the rubble of which had already been cleared in January 1939, were deducted from the sales proceeds.

The West End synagogue, which was hardly damaged on the outside, was the only one to be spared demolition after it was sold. During the Second World War it served as a furniture store for bomb-damaged Frankfurt citizens and as a set store for the Frankfurt Opera . In March 1944, it was hit by bombs, which caused considerable further damage.

The Israelite Community and the Orthodox Israelite Religious Society , which split off from it in 1852 , were forcibly united by the National Socialists to form the Jewish Community in 1939 . Between October 1941 and September 1942, over 10,000 Jews who remained in Frankfurt were deported in a total of ten transports, mostly to Theresienstadt or Majdanek . After the last transport, fewer than 300 Jews remained in the city, most of whom lived in so-called mixed marriages or were employees of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany and had to do forced labor. Until mid-March 1945, two weeks before the occupation of Frankfurt by American troops on March 26, 1945, there were repeated deportations. Partly by individuals, but also larger transports with up to 300 Jews from Frankfurt and the surrounding area.

Over 11,000 deportees perished in the extermination camps, around 400 were still alive when the camps were liberated. Around 160 Jews were still living in Frankfurt at the end of the war.

The new Jewish community

Prayer room

Tora shrine with Ner Tamid and Bima

Immediately after the end of the war, the new city government installed by the American army founded a Jewish care center for the city of Frankfurt am Main to look after the survivors. Around 400 survivors had returned to the city by summer. On September 12, 1945 (5th Tishri 5706 according to the Jewish calendar ) the first service took place in the badly damaged Westend synagogue. The sermon was given by Rabbi Leopold Neuhaus , who was the last Frankfurt rabbi from 1939 to 1942 and who had survived the war in the Theresienstadt concentration camp .

Many members of the newly founded Jewish community , including Rabbi Neuhaus, emigrated to America or Palestine in the following years. Instead, over 5000 Displaced Persons from Eastern Europe came to Frankfurt by 1949 , former concentration camp prisoners or forced laborers who could not or did not want to return to their home countries and were housed by the American army in a DP camp in Frankfurt-Zeilsheim . Some stayed in Frankfurt and did not emigrate. They formed the core of the new Jewish community in Frankfurt, which had grown to over 2000 people by 1949.

On September 6, 1950 the inauguration of the rebuilt synagogue took place. A synagogue choir from Paris had come to the inauguration, and the former rabbi of the West End synagogue Georg Salzberger, who now lived in London, gave a speech in which he gave the many Jews who were not from Frankfurt an insight into Jewish life in Frankfurt before the Holocaust . The consecration speech was given by the state and community rabbi Wilhelm Weinberg, who had come to Frankfurt as successor from Neuhaus. Inside the synagogue, the former splendor had given way to the sobriety of the 1950s. The architects of the reconstruction were Max Kemper and Werner Hebebrand . The construction management was carried out by Hans Leistikow , who also created the new glass windows. Many of the renovation measures remained provisional because, on the one hand, a few years after the end of the war there was a lack of money in the badly destroyed city, and on the other hand, hardly anyone believed in a future for the Jewish community in Frankfurt after the Holocaust.

From 1988 to 1994, the synagogue was extensively renovated according to plans by the architect Henryk Isenberg . When, contrary to expectations, much of the original building fabric came to light under the plaster and cladding of the reconstruction, it was decided to undertake a more historically accurate reconstruction of the building. The construction costs of 8.5 million marks were shared by the federal government, the state of Hesse, the city of Frankfurt and the Jewish community. The renovation work was ceremoniously completed on August 29, 1994.

See also

• Jewish community Frankfurt am Main
• Main synagogue (Frankfurt) , Börneplatz synagogue
• Yeshiva Gedolah Frankfurt

literature

• Frankfurt Historical Commission (ed.): Frankfurt am Main - The history of the city in nine contributions. (=  Publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XVII ). Jan Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1991, ISBN 3-7995-4158-6 .
• Georg Heuberger (ed.), Who builds a house wants to stay. 50 years of the Frankfurt am Main Jewish Community. Beginnings and the present . Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-7973-0692-X
• Georg Heuberger (ed.), And nobody said Kaddisch for us ... Deportations from Frankfurt am Main 1941 to 1945 . Stroemfeld Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Basel 2005, ISBN 3-8787-7045-6
• Rachel Heuberger, Helga Krohn: Out of the Ghetto. Jews in Frankfurt am Main 1800–1950. Book accompanying the permanent exhibition of the Jewish Museum . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-1003-1407-7
• Eugen Mayer: The Frankfurt Jews . Frankfurt am Main 1966, Waldemar Kramer Verlag
• Wolf-Christian Setzepfandt : Architecture Guide Frankfurt am Main / Architectural Guide . 3. Edition. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-496-01236-6 , p. 41 (German, English).

Web links

Commons : Westend Synagogue  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Jewish Community Frankfurt am Main Kdö.R.
• The Jewish information portal about Frankfurt am Main
• Escaped demolition - article in the FAZ of November 8, 2006
• The Westend Synagogue in the Frankfurt am Main portal 1933–1945
• State Office for Monument Preservation Hessen (Ed.): Westend Synagogue In: DenkXweb, online edition of cultural monuments in Hessen

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sacha Roesler: Fortress of Science. The first building of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and its ambiguous character , in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of November 3, 2012, p. 65.
2. ↑ information on the Walcker organ
3. ↑ FAZ of October 26, 2010, page 29: A refuge in the gravity of our days

Coordinates: 50 ° 7 ′ 16 ″  N , 8 ° 39 ′ 52 ″  E