Jewish Museum in the Rashi House

Jüdisches Museum im Raschi-Haus

Between 1938 and 1942, the building that is today the Rashi House in Worms was used as a collection point for elderly and sick Jews from Worms and surrounding areas. In 1942, the last deportations from Worms departed from here. The Jewish Museum is located in the reconstructed building. In its exhibition, it commemorates Jewish life in Worms and the fates of those who were deported.

History

Worms was one of the most important centres of Jewish life in Central Europe during the Middle Ages. Already in 1034, a synagogue was built in the city. It is said that around 1060, the renowned Talmud scholar Rashi studied in Worms for a few years. In 1096, during the crusades, one of the bloodiest pogroms of the Middle Ages against Jews took place in Worms. In 1623, the Jewish community built an extension to the synagogue, and a small Yeshiva was established in it; the extension was referred to as the Rashi Chapel. About 1860, the growing Jewish community had 985 members. Many were highly respected citizens, holding important positions in politics, culture and business. In 1849, Worms was the first city in Germany with a Jewish mayor. When the National Socialists took power, there were about 1,100 Jews living in Worms. Like in the rest of Germany, the Jews were increasingly excluded from all spheres of public life. National Socialists in Worms forced Jews to abandon their public offices, to leave associations they had for years been members of, and Jewish businesses were boycotted. Already in 1933, several Jews were arrested by the SA and taken to the nearby Osthofen concentration camp. Due to the limitations to their personal freedom and the increasingly frequent and brutal anti-Semitic attacks taking place in Worms, many Jews left the city. By December 1937, the number of Jewish residents in Worms had decreased to 525. During the »Kristallnacht« in November 1938, members and supporters of the National Socialist party burned down the over 900-year old synagogue and the Rashi Chapel. Beginning 1938, the SS turned the former Jewish hospital into a collecting point primarily for elderly Jews from Worms and vicinity. In 1942, deportations trains left from here, bringing the last of the Worms Jews to extermination camps in the east.

Worms, about 1933, The Jewish hospital, Stadtarchiv Worms

Worms, 2005, View of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Stadt Worms

Victims

Of the approximately 1,100 Jews who lived in Worms in 1933, about 430 men, women and children perished in the Holocaust.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

The partly preserved early medieval building which is today the Rashi House was used by the Jewish community of Worms for centuries. Located here was the Jewish hospital and between 1938 and 1942, the building also housed a home for the elderly. The Rashi House was in direct vicinity of the synagogue which was destroyed in 1938. In 1971, the city council had parts of the increasingly derelict building torn down. Only the cellar ceilings and parts of the ground floor remained. Many years of efforts to rebuild the house to its original state finally succeeded. In 1982, what was once the Jewish community building was inaugurated as the Rashi House. It is most probably located at the site where the Yeshiva, at which Rashi studied around 1060, stood. The Jewish Museum is situated in the historic cellar rooms and the ground floor of the Rashi House; located in the upper floor is the municipal archive. The exhibition at the museum deals with the history of Worms Jews from the beginnings of the Jewish community's existence up to the end of the National Socialist regime. In 1961, the Worms synagogue and Rashi Chapel were inaugurated anew. The initiators of the reconstruction conducted their work in reference to the building's state prior to its destruction in 1938.

Worms, 1938, Neighbours and onlookers following the »Kristallnacht« in front of the burning Old Synagogue, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors

Worms, 2005, View of the Rashi House as seen from the synagogue garden, Stadt Worms

Possibilities

Shared location and administration with the municipal archive, which is home to a large Judaica collection, a reference library, user workplaces, photo archive

Open

April to October Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. and 1.30 p.m. to 5 p.m., November to March Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. and 1.30 p.m. to 4.30 p.m.

Contact

https://www.worms.de/juedisches-museum/

stadtarchiv@worms.de

+49(0) 6241 853 470 1

Hintere Judengasse 6
67547 Worms

Worms, 2005, Detailed view of the exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Worms, Stadt Worms

Worms, 2005, The Rashi Chapel and the Rashi House, Stadt Worms

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