Old Synagogue Erfurt

Alte Synagoge Erfurt

The museum in the Old Synagogue in Erfurt was opened in 2009. Both the displayed artefacts and the building itself illustrate the history of the Jewish community in Erfurt.

History

During the Middle Ages, Erfurt was an important centre of Jewish life in Europe. The Jewish community, which had scholars and merchants among its members, strongly influenced the economic and intellectual life of the city. This era came to an end with the pogrom of 1349. After the Jews' final expulsion from the city in 1485, the city had no Jewish residents. Only under Prussian rule did Jewish merchants return to Erfurt and receive the same rights as Christians. In 1840, the Jews of Erfurt dedicated a new synagogue. Soon, this building did not meet the requirements of the rapidly growing Jewish community so the new Great Synagogue was inaugurated in 1884. The community continued to grow: in 1853, there were 191 Jews in Erfurt; in 1900, there were 782. After the NSDAP had taken power, the National Socialists organised a boycott of Jewish businesses. By 1936, the number of Jews living in Erfurt had sunk to 660. During the »Kristallnacht« on November 9/10, 1938, the National Socialists destroyed the Great Synagogue. 197 Jewish men were arrested and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. During the war, the SS and the Gestapo deported nearly all Jews who had remained in Erfurt to concentration camps and ghettos in the east.
After the war, a few Jews returned to Thuringia and established the Jewish community in Erfurt and vicinity anew. In the years that followed, however, many left for Israel due to the political situation. With the exception of the Jewish community in Erfurt, the second-largest in the GDR after Berlin, all Jewish communities in Thuringia were dissolved. The synagogue in Erfurt, which had been inaugurated in 1952, became more and more derelict. In 1988, the Jewish community in Erfurt consisted of only 30 members.

Erfurt, November 10, 1938, Residents and onlookers in front of the burned down Great Synagogue in Erfurt following the »Kristallnacht«, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors

Erfurt, 2009, Exhibition on the first floor in the Old Synagogue, Stadtverwaltung Erfurt

Victims

The exhibition in the Old Synagogue presents models, artefacts and scriptures with the help of which the history of Jewish life in Erfurt during the Middle Ages is told.

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 Old Synagogue, the oldest parts of which date back to the 11th century, is considered to be Europe's oldest intact synagogue. The building was not destroyed throughout the centuries due to the fact that its initial function was largely forgotten. In the course of the 500 years after the pogrom of 1349, when the synagogue was severely damaged, the building was used as a warehouse. In the late 19th century, the building was used as a tavern. Located on the first floor was a dance hall in which the stucco figures and colourful ornamental painting for the most part remain. The suspended ceiling has been replaced by a gallery; situated on the ground floor were a kitchen and a guest room. There were bowling alleys on both the ground floor and in the basement.
When the building was restored at the beginning of the 1990s, its various functions over the centuries were made visible. In 2009, the city of Erfurt opened a museum in the building. The valuable artefacts presented in the exhibition, such as the Hebrew scripts of the Jewish community, make the Middle Ages its focal point.
Two other synagogues in Erfurt testify to the history of Jewish life in Erfurt. The Small Synagogue, built in 1840, was used as a synagogue only until 1884. It henceforth served as a residential building and a warehouse, which spared it from being destroyed by the National Socialists. In 1884, the Jewish community opened the Great Synagogue, a domed structure which could seat 500 people. It was destroyed by the National Socialists on November 9/10, 1938. The New Synagogue was built on the same site in 1952, the only synagogue to be built during the existence of the GDR.

Erfurt, 2009, Exhibition in the Old Synagogue, Stadtverwaltung Erfurt

Erfurt, 2009, Basement in the Old Synagogue dating back to the 14th century, Stadtverwaltung Erfurt

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition on the history of Jewish life in Erfurt during the Middle Ages, audio guides, guided tours by appointment

Open

Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Contact

http://www.alte-synagoge.erfurt.de

altesynagoge@erfurt.de

+49 (0)361 655 160 8

An der Stadtmünze 4/5
99084 Erfurt

Erfurt, 2009, Stucco figure in the dance hall, Stadtverwaltung Erfurt

Erfurt, 2009, Old Synagogue, Stadtverwaltung Erfurt

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