Heppenheim, Germany

HEPPENHEIM an der Bergstrasse, Hesse, Germany. Annihilated during the Black Death persecutions of 1348-49, the community was reestablished around 1700 and at its height, in 1890, numbered 148. A new synagogue was opened in 1900. After WWI, a branch of the Central Union (CV) organized Jewish social and cultural activity as well as the fight against anti-Semitism. Martin Buber, the religious philosopher and Zionist leader, lived in Heppenheim between 1916 and 1938. On Kristallnacht (9-10. November 1938) Nazis burned the synagogue down. Jews were paraded through the town carrying loads of debris from their house of worship; and 3.000 volumes from Martin Buber’s library were also destroyed. Of the 113 Jews who lived there after 1933, 76 mostly young people emigrated. The remaining, mainly elderly Jews, perished in the Holocaust.