Mannheim

Summary: The emerging Jewish community of Mannheim consecrated a cemetery in 1661. (Records indicate that a mikveh existed in the city that year.) By 1662, the Jews of Mannheim had their own synagogue and a rabbi; by 1670, they had built a new synagogue alongside a community center and other Jewish institutions. All were destroyed when the French leveled the city in 1689. The synagogue, however, was rebuilt in 1700 and enlarged in 1767 and again in 1771. In Mannheim, a new Jewish cemetery was consecrated in 1840. The famous court Jews, Suess Oppenheimer (nicknamed “Jud Suess”) and Lemle Moses Reingannum (the latter of whom founded a Klaus, or a center for Torah studies, in 1708), lived in Mannheim. Rabbis Jakob Ettlinger and Samson Raphael Hirsch (Ettlinger’s pupil and, later, rabbi of Frankfurt and leader of German Orthodox Judaism) were associated with Mannheim. In the mid-18th century, two other Klaus centers were founded in the city, making Mannheim a center of Jewish learning. That, combined with the prosperity of several local Jews, explains Mannheim’s nickname as “the new Jerusalem.” In 1851, the community demolished its synagogue, which could no longer accommodate the growing congregation, and began building a new one. The new house of worship, a large and impressive Reform synagogue with an organ, was inaugurated in 1855 and renovated in 1897/99 and again in 1907/08, after which it had a seating capacity of approximately 700. Orthodox Jews conducted services at the Klaus synagogue, which in 1888 was moved to a new building, where there were seats for 128 men and 98 women; the Orthodox synagogue was renovated and enlarged in 1929/30. The community employed a second rabbi in the 20th century; Rabbi Isak Unna held that post for 37 years. Mannheim’s Eastern European Jews maintained their own prayer halls, of which at least four are known to us. The Jews of Mannheim opened a Jewish hospital, one of the first in Germany, in 1711, and a Jewish school in 1816. The school, initially a private institution, received official status in 1819; it was incorporated into a general school in 1870, the same year in which the Klaus opened a religious studies school for young Jews attending mainstream schools. Later, in 1929, a Lehrhaus (a center for adult education) was opened for adults who wished to pursue Jewish studies. Ludwig Frank, a Mannheim Jew who led the Social Democratic faction in the Baden regional parliament, was elected to the German Reichstag (national parliament). He volunteered to serve in World War I, and fell in combat on the third day of the war. Many Jewish associations and branches of nation-wide Jewish organizations were active in Mannheim in 1933. Dr. Max Gruenwald and Dr. Unna Klaus served the community that year. Jewish children were expelled from their public schools in 1934, after which they were allocated two classrooms in a local school building. A yeshiva was nevertheless opened in the Klaus synagogue that same year and, in 1935, the community established a Jewish elementary school. In 1938, the community was forced to sell its cemetery to the municipality; the remains of those buried there were disinterred and buried in a mass grave in the new cemetery. In October 1938, at least 75 local Polish Jews were expelled to Poland. One month later, on Pogrom Night, the synagogue and the cemetery’s purification house were blown up; Nazis looted the synagogue’s interior and stole its ritual objects. The interior of the Klaus synagogue—the Torah scrolls were burned on the street—was destroyed, as was the Eastern European Linas Hazedeck prayer hall, the last remaining Eastern European hall in the city. Jewish businesses and homes were attacked, and property was ransacked, looted and, in some cases, set on fire. In Mannheim, the looting and destruction continued even after Goebbels ordered a stop to the pogrom. All Jewish men under 60 were deported to Dachau, where several died. After the pogrom, many Palatinate Jews escaped to Mannheim: the Jewish hospital housed 350 of these refugees, and prayer services were held in shifts at the renovated Klaus synagogue. Approximately 3,927 Mannheim Jews emigrated; 485 died in the city; 40 committed suicide; 67 either died in custody or were executed, and 1,984 were deported to Gurs, in France, on October 22, 1940. After the deportation, several hundred Jews (most were elderly, sick or married to ethnic Germans) remained in Mannheim, of whom the able-bodied were subjected to forced labor. The hospital building was confiscated in December 1941, and the school was closed in the summer of 1942. Patients from the hospital were moved to the old-age home, and when that, too, was seized (in 1943), to private homes. In 1941/42, three more transports of Jews left Mannheim for Izbica (Poland), Theresienstadt and Auschwitz; in February 1945, another transport left for Theresienstadt. In total, 2,375 Jews were deported from Mannheim. Approximately 1,300 local Jews perished in the Shoah. The synagogue’s ruins, damaged during an aerial bombing in 1943, were cleared in 1955/56; in 1962/63, a combined commercial and residential building was built on the site, to which a memorial plaque was affixed in 1964. The Klaus synagogue, appropriated by the municipality after the deportation to Gurs, was used as a storage site until it, too, was damaged by an aerial bombing in 1944; the ruins were cleared in 1953 and later rebuilt. A memorial plaque was affixed to a nearby church in 2000, and a memorial stone was unveiled at the new cemetery in 1953. In 2003, the town unveiled a monument. The new Jewish community of Mannheim was founded in 1945. A new synagogue and community center were opened in 1957; in 1987, yet another synagogue and community center were established in the city.

Author / Sources: Nurit Borut
Sources: AJ, IGML, PK-BW