Wiesbaden, Germany

Wiesbaden Hesse-Nassau, Germany. A health resort dating from Roman times, Wiesbaden had a Jewish community in 1573. Though subject to various restrictions (1638), it provided visitors with kosher facilities, maintained a district rabbinate from 1708, and opened a synagogue accommodating 200 worshipers in 1826. Avraham Geiger served as communal rabbi in 1832-38 and introduced changes in public worship; he also made Wiesbaden the venue for the first conference of Reform rabbis in Germany in 1837. Religious issues came to a head during the rabbinate of Samuel Suesskind (1844-84). At the imposing new Moorish synagogue, dedicated in 1869, services were accompanied by an organ and choir. Orthodox Jews, who already attended a separate minyan, established a breakaway community which was recognized in 1879 under the Prussian law of secession. Its rabbinate was headed by Leo Kahn and subsequently by Jonas Ansbacher. The Jews of Wiesbaden, numbering 152 in 1825, played a leading role in commerce and the professions, especially medicine. By 1905 their number had increased to 2,656. The historian Adolf Kober served as Liberal district rabbi (1909-18) and Jews from Eastern Europe (Ostjuden) boosted the community's final growth to 3,463 in 1925. A Juedisches Lehrhaus was established in 1921 to promote Jewish adult education in the Liberal community. A conference of the German Zionist Organization held in Wiesbaden in 1924 was attended by WZO President Chaim Weizmann. Branches of the Central Union (C.Y.), Jewish War Veterans Association, Mizrachi, Agudat Israel, WIZO, and several Zionist youth movements were active during the Weimar Republic. Anti-Semitism made little headway before WWI, but the deteriorating economic situation led to a rapid increase in anti-Jewish violence from 1930. Once Hitler came to power in 1933, Nazi boycott measures afflicted the community (then numbering 2,713). Jews were dismissed from public office, at least two were murdered, and the "Aryanization" of their stores (over 250) began. Doctors were among the first to leave, 33 out of 54 emigrating by 1938. The community's welfare workers fed and aided the distressed while the rabbi opened a district school in 1936 and valiantly sought to sustain Jewish morale. On Kristallnacht (9-10 Nov. 1938), SS troops burned the Liberal synagogue to the ground and partly destroyed the Orthodox synagogue; 23 Jews died in the riots, after which hundreds were imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. The number of Jews declined to 1,125 by 1939; 500 were deported to the east in March-June 1942 and 600 to the Theresienstadt ghetto in September 1942. Nearly 40 Jews committed suicide before the last transport and many of the 600 converts or part-Jews (Mischlinge) died in Nazi camps. The postwar community of Holocaust survivors, mainly from Eastern Europe, dedicated a new synagogue in 1966 and grew to about 400 in 1990.