Bad Homburg vor der Hoehe, Germany

Bad Homburg Hesse-Nassau, Germay. Jews lived there in the 14th century but a permanent community was only established 350 years later, when the landgrave invited Jews and Huguenots to settle in Homburg vor der Hoehe (1684). A synagogue was opened (1731) and a Hebrew printing house published 45 works (1710-48). Jews contributed to the town's development as a health resort. By 1865 their number had grown to 604. They built an imposing new synagogue (1866) with a community center (1877), also opening three sanatoriums and two famous kosher hotels that had an international clientele. The establishment of Agudat Israel was first mooted at a conference held in the town (1909); Aharon Roke'ah of Belz, Hayyim Soloveichik, and Yitzhak Volozhiner paid regular visits; while the sculptor Mark Antokolsli and World Zionist Organization president David Wolffsohn both died there. After WWI, Shoshana and Yehoshua Persitz transferred the Omanut publishing house from Moscow to Bad Homburg and their home served as a meeting place for Russian-Jewish writers and intellectuals (1920-1925). The community, persecuted by the Nazis, dwindled from 300 (2%) in 1933 to 70 on Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), when SA troops burned the synagogue to the ground in a general pogrom. The last Jews were deported in 1942-1943; at least 45 perished in the Holocaust.