Jewish life in Leipzig

Jewish life in Germany has a long history. The first written record dates back to the 4th century. The 1700th anniversary will be celebrated throughout Germany with a festival year in 2021. Jewish people have greatly contributed to the success of Saxony. For example, as merchants, freedom fighters, women’s rights activists, revolutionaries, lawyers, doctors, artists, scientists and entrepreneurs, they have left their mark on the past and present.

The earliest evidence of Jewish life in Saxony is found in Meissen and Altzella and dates back to the 11th century. In Leipzig, the presence of a Jewish population is recorded in the first half of the 13th century; around 1250, a settlement called “Judenburg” existed outside the city walls. After their expulsion, a new settlement formed in the middle of the 13th century. There is evidence of at least three Jewish families living in Leipzig in 1364. However, they did not form a community of their own. Consequently, they did not possess any of the important social facilities of such a community, such as a Jewish cemetery .

Until a central water supply system was built in towns and villages, Jewish housewives had similar difficulties as their Christian neighbours. They had to carry water from their own well or a public well into their homes. Then they had to take on the laborious task of washing laundry, keeping water clean for drinkign and cooking, bathign their children, and cleaning their homes. It was harder for Jewish families than their Christian counterparts because of strict religious rules – e.g. the precise observance of rituals, prayer times, as well as food regulations. Jewish women had to pay close attention to where they bought meat, how they cleaned poultry, which vegetables they chose, and which foods they were not allowed to cook together. Dishes for Shabbat had to be pre-cooked and preserved, as work, inclduing domestic work, was forbidden from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday. The observance of food and living rules was and is an important aspect of Jewish life, which were only made harder in the past due to exclusionarr regulations by Christian sovereigns.

It was not uncommon for the Jewish population in medieval cities to be subjected to discrimination that sometimes led to attacks. In addition to accusations of usury, after the first occurrence of the plague in Central Europe in 1348/49 accusations were made against members of Jewish communities that they were poisoning wells in order to spread the plague. This led to deadly pogroms against the Jewish population in Leipzig in 1350. It recorded in the Leipzig annals of Johann Jacob Vogel:

Time and again there were violent attacks on and expulsions of the Jewish population motivated by religious anti-Jewish, Christian, and socio-economic factors – especially in times of crisis. Because of this from teh middle fo teh 15th century there were no longer and Jewiwsh people settled in Leipzig. Municipal privileges de non tolerandis judaeis were issued to expel the Jewish population from cities and, above all, to eliminate them as economic competitors in urban trade. Consequently, in the 16th and 17th centuries Jewish merchants, traders and pedlars were only allowed to stay in Leipzig three times a year during the trade fairs.

This situation prevailed until the end of the 17th century. The situation schanged at the beginning of the 18th century, when Jewish merchants were allowed to settle on Leipzig’s Brühl during the trade fair. Many Jewish merchants from Brody in northern Galicia, Russia, Hungary and the former Polish republic came to trade in the fair city over the decades.

The Jewish population in Saxony continued to gain rights as time progressed. From the 1830s onwards the Jewish community in Leipzig grew. More and more Jewish people were drawn to Leipzig, a cosmopolitan city of trade and fairs. Many Jewish residents decided to settle in the Waldstraßenviertel. The Waldstraßenviertel – like other Wilhelminian quarters in this city – was filled with modern, representative middle-class houses for the first time. For a long time, Jewish and non-Jewish residents lived together in peace and friendliness.

On 2 June 1847, the Jewish Religious Communits was founded. After only one year of planning and construction, the main synagogue on Gottschedstraße was consecrated for its intended purpose on 10 September 1855 by a representative of Reform Judaism and Jewish scholar Rabbi Adolf (Aron) Jellinek.

The Jewish community had many opportunities to come together for prayer in synagogues, prayer rooms and private homes; and there were several rabbis, each catering for the Orthodox, Reform and other Jewish affiliations.

One of the best-known members of the community was teacher and preacher Rabbi Dr Abraham Mayer Goldschmidt, who moved from Warsaw to Leipzig with his wife Henriette Goldschmidt (née Benas) and his three sons, who came from his first marriage, three years after the dedication of the large synagogue.

The activities of Jewish women continue to have a great impact on Leipzig’s cityscape to this day, e.g. the Ariowitsch House and the Eitingon Hospital. The Association for Family and National Education, initiated and led by Henriette Goldschmidt, was interdenominational and not purely a women’s association. Like other civic women’s associations, the Leipzig associations of the local branch of the JFB, the Jewish Women’s Federation, primarily performed voluntary social work, which was sometimes supplemented with the use of paid professionals for certain tasks. The associations were open to women committed to social causes. Multiple memberships were common, as was simultaneous involvement in other charitable associations in the community.

In 1910, the Leipzig local group of the JFB and the related women’s associations were founded, andwere active until the National Socialists seized power. These included the Israelite Women’s Association, the Women’s Association “Ruth”, the Israelite Kindergarten, Tagesheim e. V. and the Sisters’ Association of Leipzig Lodge XXXXIII No. 496 of the Independent Order Bnai Brith (U.O.B.B.) as well as the Israelite Savings and Insurance Association for girls who had left school, an organization to which men also belonged.

Women from religiously or economically influential families were predominantly involved in the management of such associations. Until the First World War, the associations carried out self-help work that was autonomous from the majority of society. They also served as a way to secure livelihoods and strengthen the Jewish community against internal and external risks.

In 1925, 12,594 people of Jewish denomination lived in Leipzig. In 1931, there were 17 synagogues of various orientations and prayer houses in the city – from liberal to reform Jewish to orthodox Judaism – as well as 8 Jewish charitable institutions.

Two more synagogues were located directly in the Waldstrasse quarter in Färberstrasse. In 1912/13, the Higher Israelite School was founded in Gustav-Adolf-Strasse 7 by Rabbi Ephraim Carlebach. In 1929, the Israelite hospital was opened in Eitingonstraße – it treated people regardless of their religious affiliation. In 1931, the Jewish old people’s home in Auenstraße, donated by the Ariowitsch family, was opened. There had been a Jewish kindergarten since 1915. In 1929/30, the Jewish banker Hans Kroch built a housing estate in Neugohlis, which today would be counted as social housing.

The activities of völkisch anti-Semitic groups, caused hostility towards Jewish people to spread in the 19th century. A national, racial divide was constructed between “the Germans” and the Jewish population, despite the fact they were also German. From then on, Jews were no longer discriminated against solely on the basis of their religious affiliation, but it was claimed that “Jewish” characteristics were genetically determined and inferior. In 1897, there had already been four publishing houses in Leipzig that published anti-Semitic literature, as well as the journal “Antisemitische Korrespondenz”.

After the National Socialists were voted into power on 30 January 1933, the growing anti-Semitic sentiment and the first anti-Jewish laws led to a visible change in the public coexistence of citizens.

Non-Jewish citizens were no longer allowed to consult Jewish doctors and lawyers. Jewish shops were boycotted. “Aryan customers” of Jewish wholesalers and catalogue selling companies no longer paid for the goods delivered, so bankruptcies and liquidationsof Jewish businesses increased. Jewish civil servants, teachers, scientists, and artists were dismissed from their posts in the civil service. The racial laws passed during the Reich Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1935 further cudified the discrimination against the Jewish population. The social and economic exclusion of Jews became a hallmark of Nazi policy regarding the Jewish population.

From July 1935 onwards, Jewish people were no longer allowed to use municipal baths. Staying in parks was restricted to a small area, even visiting forests was no longer allowed. A little later, Jewish people were finally barred from visiting public institutions (cinemas, theatres, restaurants, etc.). By mid-1938, about 70% of the existing Jewish businesses were no longer Jewish-owned.

More and more Jewish people saw their only option to continuewith their lives as leaving Germany, but this was impeded by bureaucratic hurdles and the financial burden of immigrating. Some families tried send their children to safety in England or Denmark with “Kindertransports – organised by the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland.

In October 1938, the short-term deportation of around 17,000 Jewish people with Polish citizenship was arranged throughout Germany: the so-called “Polenaktion. The Eitingon Hospital in Leipzig took in about 200 Polish Jews as patients to save them from the deportations.

On the night of Kristallnacht on 9/10 November 1938, synagogues and Jewish institutions were set on fire in Leipzig. Jewish people were attacked and deported, their homes and businesses destroyed and looted. The large synagogues in Gottschedstraße and Otto-Schill-Straße were burnt down; the smaller synagogues and prayer rooms were attacked. Only the synagogue in Keilstraße which was located between two residential buildings was not set on fire, but it was completely looted inside, desecrated and finally misused as a warehouse. The police and fire brigade were officially instructed not to intervene in the riots and to immediately shoot Jewish people who resisted.

On the evening of 9 November 1938, the Gestapo rounded up hundreds of Jewish people at the Parthebrücke in Pfaffendorfer Straße and deported them to the concentration camps Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen on 10 November 1938.

By the end of 1938, Jews in Germany had largely been deprived of their economic livelihood and their structural social isolation was almost completed. They were largely or completely ousted from many professional fields. Due to the ordinance on “Closed Labour Deployment”, many Jewish people were obliged to perform forced labour. Leipzig was the first major city in Germany to introduce compulsory work for Jewish people in the spring of 1940.

The Jewish population was also forced out of their flats when the legal protection of tenants for the Jewish population was abolished in April 1939. Landlords were able to terminate a tenancy without further ado by “observing the time limits”. In future, Jews were to be housed in pre-determined residential quarters and apartment buildings, so-called “Juden-Häusern” (“Jew Houses”). In the early 1940s, the Carlebach School became the largest “Judenhaus” in Leipzig. Jewish property was confiscated. In Leipzig, the auction company Klemm, among others, was commissioned to collect and auction off the remaining inventory. The auctioned items ended up in flats and houses of non-Jewish Germans. The proceeds were appropriated by the Nazi state.

In 1942, the deportations of Jewish people to Riga began in Leipzig. With the first deportation train on 21 January, 563 people from Leipzig were transported to Riga. With the fourth deportation from Leipzig, the Auenstraße old people’s home was “emptied”; afterwards it served as the Leipzig Gestapo’s headquarters. The last transport from Leipzig to the concentration camp Theresienstadt took place on 14 February 1945. A total of about 2000 Jewish people from Leipzig were deported in nine deportation trains, of whom only 220 survived.

When Leipzig was liberated on 18 April 1945, 19 members of the Jewish community were still living in Leipzig.

After 1945, around 250 Holocaust survivors returned to Leipzig.

The diverse Jewish life and its infrastructure that once existed in Leipyig had been destroyed; families torn apart and driven away by persecution or emigrated all over the world, or murdered in concentration camps.

The few Jewish people in Leipzig re-founded the Jewish Religious Community of Leipzig. Soon they found support from returning and new Jewish survivors. In 1949, the congregation numbered 340 people.

Due in part to the openly anti-Semitic policies of the GDR government, also in the wake of the Slansky trials, many Jewish citizens left Leipzig again. As a result of this, only 29 people were registered in the Jewish Religious Community of Leipzig in 1989.

The influx of contingent refugees from the former states of the Soviet Union enabled the revival of Jewish life in the city since the 1990s. Today, the congregation is the largest Jewish community in Saxony with around 1,300 members.

With the Lehrhaus Beth Etz Chaim under the leadership of Rabbi Esther Jonas-Märtin, there is now also a liberal community in Leipzig again, which revives the former Jewish polyphony in the trade fair city.

Several associations and foundations are dedicated in many ways to the commemoration and remembrance of Jewish life in Leipzig. The host, among other things, the Jewish Weeks that take place every two years.