Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Frankfurt am Main, Hessen-Nassau, Germany. An important commercial hub, Frankfurt had one of the oldest Jewish communities in Germany. Established in the eleventh century, the community grew to around 200 and maintained a synagogue and two yeshivas. In 1241, disagreements involving forced Christianization led to the slaughter of some of 160 Jews. After a period of absence, the Jews returned to Frankfurt in 1270 and the community resumed its activity. In 1349, Kaiser Karl IV transferred his authority over the Jews in Frankfurt to the municipal authorities; the Jews experienced their second massacre in July of that year. It took until 1360 for the Jewish population to recover and to begin settling in the city again. By 1412, their numbers had increased to twenty-nine families. From the fourteenth century onward, Frankfurt was a center of Jewish scholarship. Its well-known rabbis included Alexander Suesslin HaKohen, Eliezer Treves, and Akiva Frankfurter. Isaiah haLevi Horovitz, known as “The Sh’la” (an acronym of the title of his master oeuvre, Shnei luhot ha-brit), headed the rabbinical court from1606–1614. The “uprising of the guilds,” headed by Vincenz Fettmilch, triggered a violent raid on the Jewish quarter on August 22–23, 1614, and 1,390 Jews were driven from the city. Two years later, Kaiser Matthias allowed the Jews to return and even gave them a letter endowing them with special entitlements. From then on, Jews in Frankfurt experienced no further evictions and their numbers increased steadily apart from the period of the Thirty-Year War. During the period of French rule (1798–1813), Jews enjoyed equal rights which, however, steadily eroded after the defeat of Napoleon in 1813. Entitlements were further lost following the Hep-Hep pogroms of August 1819, when an enflamed mob burst into the Jewish quarter and injured several Jews. In 1824, the Frankfurt senate granted Jewish townspeople third-class citizenship, and while they could practice law, they were not allowed to hold public office. The city’s Jewish population increased steadily from 5,730 (9 percent of the municipal population) in 1858 to 8,238 (10 percent) in 1867. After the Second Reich was established in 1871, it continued to expand, from 11,887 in 1875 to 26,228 in 1910. The Jewish quarter was abolished for good in 1874 and its main features, the Judengasse and the Judenmarkt were renamed the Börnestraße and the Börneplatz in 1884. The Jews were finally able to enter public life and between 1867 and 1890, there were Jews who represented Frankfurt in the Reichstag — an achievement unparalleled in any other German city at this time. The Jews of Frankfurt figured prominently in trade, manufacturing, banking (the House of Rothschild operated there until the beginning of the twentieth century), intellectual life, and the sciences. In the nineteenth century, Frankfurt was not only the center of the Jewish Enlightenment but also the cradle of the Neo-Orthodox movement. The pioneer of Neo-Orthodoxy, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, headed the “secessionist” Orthodox congregation Adath Jeshurun. One of the most prominent scholars in the city was Franz Rosenzweig, author of The Star of Redemption; another was the Zionist philosopher Martin Buber. In 1930, some 30,000 Jews lived in Frankfurt, comprising the second-largest Jewish population among German cities, exceeded only by Berlin. In early 1933, the Jewish mayor Ludwig Landmann also took office. On March 12, 1933, six weeks after Hitler rose to power, Landmann was forced to resign his post and was replaced by a Nazi. Jewish senior employees and professors at the university were also dismissed and on April 1 Nazi Party circles campaigned for a boycott against Jewish-owned businesses as well as Jewish lawyers, doctors, actors, singers, musicians, writers, and journalists. Boycotts against Jews continued after the general boycott day, including actions aimed at German businesses that employed Jews. Jewish-owned businesses lost dozens of percent of their turnover; many went bankrupt or passed into Nazi hands. The mayor dismissed all Jewish municipal employees before a national statute required this. His example was followed by other public institutions including hospitals, courts, schools, the university, and institutes of culture and the arts. After the passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935, the swath of dismissals expanded to include Jewish war-front veterans from World War I. Most privately owned businesses also fired their Jewish employees. According to the June 1933 census, 26,158 Jews lived in Frankfurt (less than 5 percent of the city’s population); from then to 1938, many left and some 50 percent emigrated, including young people that raised the average age of the Jews who remained. Many elderly Jews from nearby localities moved to Frankfurt, causing the city’s Jewish population to swell. The Jews’ economic decline threatened to drive both Jewish congregations, the main one and the “Secessionist,” to financial collapse. Their members’ willingness to pay hefty dues and make sizable donations in cash and in goods, however, allowed the community institutions and welfare organizations to keep going. A vocational retraining institute was also established; it equipped hundreds of young people with craft and agricultural skills. The Jews in Frankfurt, like those in many other locations in Germany, responded to their banishment from social and cultural life by creating separate cultural lives of their own. In November 1933, Martin Buber reactivated the "Jüdisches Lehrhaus", established by Franz Rosenzweig in the 1920s, and instituted a diverse program of lectures in various fields. Sports activity increased until it engaged thousands of young people although was allowed to operate in special facilities only. In 1935, the authorities also set aside a separate swimming pool for Jews where they were allowed to swim segregated from the rest of the population. Following an interlude between 1936–1937, antisemitic activity surged again. On October 28, 1938, the Nazi authorities attempted to expel Jewish Polish nationals back to Poland, including some 2,000 from Frankfurt. The deportees were taken to the Polish border but were returned to the city three days later after the Polish authorities refused to admit them. In the interim, police had sealed their homes and refused to let them re-enter. This made the deportees, who were not allowed to return to their homes, wards of the Jewish community. The Kristallnacht violence began in Frankfurt early on the morning of November 10 as Nazi Party and SS activists looted and torched the large synagogues, destroying forty Torah scrolls. Later that day, most of the small synagogues were set ablaze and desecrated. Marauders broke into Jewish homes and shops and plundered the Jewish museum, although the mayor made sure that important historical archives remained undamaged. In the course of the mayhem, 2,161 Jews aged 16–60 were arrested, paraded before a frothing mob, and sent to Buchenwald and Dachau. Nazi propaganda stressed that the family of the diplomat Ernst vom Rath (whose assassination served as the pretext for the violence) came from Frankfurt and that the assassin, Herschel Grynszpan, had attended a yeshiva in the town. The Nazis demolished the yeshiva building. In May 1939, Frankfurt still had a population of 13,751 Jews as defined by religion (about half as many by June 1933) and 14,191 “members of the Jewish race” according to the Nazi definition, plus 2,687 mischlinge (people of mixed racial descent). In late September 1941, there were 10,592 “members of the Jewish race” in Frankfurt. Between Kristallnacht and the onset of the deportations, the Jews’ lives became unendurable. They were not allowed to use public telephones, buy newspapers, visit places of entertainment, or even use the sidewalk. The Municipality of Frankfurt bought the Jewish community’s assets at a fraction of their real value. All large synagogues with one exception were totally demolished. The ancient Jewish cemetery was emptied and leveled. To contribute to the war effort, all metal elements were removed from the other Jewish cemeteries, including the lead lettering on the tombstones. In February 1940, the Gestapo appointed Ernst Holland to oversee the Jewish community welfare department. He acted on behalf of both the Gestapo and the municipality, a function that existed only in Frankfurt and had no counterpart in other cities. Holland managed all the Jews’ affairs in Frankfurt, oversaw all Jewish institutional activity which he limited, and had their property and money transferred to “Aryan” hands. On March 4, 1941, the Jews in Frankfurt were put to slave labour; this, too, was overseen by Holland. Between Kristallnacht and 1943, 715 Jews in the city committed suicide. The welfare apparatus of the Jewish community continued to function until the community was officially disbanded on November 6, 1942. The first transport of Jews from Frankfurt set out for Łódź on October 20, 1941, with 1,126 persons aboard. On November 11, 1,052 Jews were sent to Minsk and 992 were sent to Riga on November 22. In three transports (May 8, May 24, and June 11, 1942), 3,148 Jews were deported to the east, and in three additional transports (August 18, September 1, and September 15, 1942) 3,501 persons were sent to Theresienstadt. On September 24, 237 Jews were deported to the east. In 1943, 93 Jews were sent to various destinations in six transports. In 1944, 80 Jews were sent to Theresienstadt in four transports and in February–March 1945, shortly before the end of the war, the two last transports from Frankfurt am Main delivered approximately 200 Jews to Theresienstadt. In all, 10,500 Jews from Frankfurt and nearby localities were sent to ghettos, camps, and extermination sites. In June 1943, the post of Gestapo Superintendent of Jewish Charity was abolished because it was no longer needed. After the war, a new Jewish community organized in Frankfurt. The surviving synagogue in the Westend quarter was renovated and rededicated in 1950. In 1996, there were 5,300 Jews in Frankfurt, the second-largest community in Germany. The cemeteries are kept up by the municipal council and have already been desecrated several times. In 1987, vestiges of buildings in the old Jewish ghetto were discovered during excavations for construction work. A public debate broke out over how to preserve them. The Municipality wished to preserve them in the basement of City Hall; the left-wing parties and Jewish elements demanded the establishment of a special site in which the structures would be included. The Municipality rejected these demands. The city has established a local Jewish historical museum in a villa that once belonged to the Rothschild family.