A familiar tale

A personal account of a visit to the medieval city of Erfurt that in many ways encapsulates a millennium of antisemitism.

By NOAH LEDERMAN
The old synagogue, thought to be the oldest in Europe (photo credit: MICHAEL SANDER/CC BY-SA 3.0 WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
The old synagogue, thought to be the oldest in Europe
(photo credit: MICHAEL SANDER/CC BY-SA 3.0 WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia, is a preserved medieval city in Central Germany. Its architecture has survived world wars and Soviet occupation. Today, towering cathedrals and the Krämerbrücke, the city’s picturesque bridge lined on both sides with half-timbered shops, lends Erfurt a fairy-tale atmosphere.
In fact, at first glance, Erfurt seems to have also served as a safe harbor to Jewish architecture during the Holocaust, as ancient and intact synagogues, mikvaot and treasures still exist. But this is fairytale, too. The specious miracle of Jewish Erfurt stems not from some protective spell, but a millennium of antisemitism.
ERFURT’S relations with its Jewish community is a familiar story.
According to records, Jews lived in Erfurt as early as the 11th century. Within 200 years, however, Christians killed about 25 Jews living in Erfurt during the Crusades. The second wave of Jews was wiped out in 1349, when Christians in the city launched a pogrom as a preventative measure for warding off the Black Death and in response to antisemitic claims that Jews were poisoning wells.
They massacred all of Erfurt’s 900 Jews.
In fact, the mass murder displeased the archbishop of Mainz, for he had been receiving an annual security tax from the city’s Jews: 23 kilograms of silver and four kilograms of pepper.
This loss of tax eventually led to new orders: Bring in new Jews. Thus, enter Erfurt’s third Jewish population, who experienced a modicum of peace (and the consistency of tax collection) until 1453, when the city council paid the price of the Jews’ annual tax just so they could get the promise of protection revoked. The Jews left again and didn’t come back for 350 years, when Erfurt became part of Prussia in 1802.
Round four of Jewish life in Erfurt ends where you’d expect: with the Nazis.
In the concentration camps, most of the 1,100 Jewish residents of Erfurt were murdered.
Paradoxically, as is the case in many places in Europe, it is also because of the city’s violent and garden-variety antisemitism that Erfurt is today a trove of Jewish history.
Of the four synagogues in Erfurt that had all been named for their appearance – old, small, great, and new (alte, kleine, grosse, neue) – only one has disappeared from the city (The Great Synagogue was destroyed on Kristallnacht).
The Old Synagogue, which was first erected in 1094, is thought to be the oldest synagogue still standing in Central Europe. It was in 1349, when the 900 Jews in the city had been murdered, that the synagogue ceased to function as such. After the pogrom, the shul was transformed into a warehouse and its original significance was forgotten for centuries, long enough to go overlooked on Kristallnacht.
While Erfurt has had a fifth Jewish wave – a population of about 600 Jews lives in the city today – no longer does the Old Synagogue function as a house of worship. It stands as a museum that whispers of Erfurt’s devastating past. At the entrance, a few shattered tombstones and a short history hang in the courtyard.
Inside, old wooden pillars hold up the second story. More could be done to tell the millennium-old story of antisemitism in Erfurt. In a way, however, the collection in the cellar accomplishes that. Displayed underground are tens of millions of dollars in treasure that undoubtedly belonged to one of Erfurt’s Jews.
In 1998, archeologists uncovered an urn near the synagogue, which is kept today inside the building. Inside the vessel was a treasure trove of buttons, brooches, rings, dress ornaments and kilograms of silver coins and ingots. The prize of the collection is a gaudy wedding ring with a giant gold temple rising up from the band. It is emblazoned with the Hebrew “mazal tov.”
A few blocks from the Old Synagogue is the Small Synagogue, built in 1840, but used for less than 50 years. It was restored in 1998. Today, it offers little more than a quick history on Jewish Erfurt and displays a small mikve (ritual bath).
More interesting is the mikve near to the Old Synagogue. Once the Jews of the Middle Ages became part of Erfurt’s past, the ritual bath along the river, much like the Old Synagogue, was converted into a storehouse and functioned as such for the better part of a millennium.
But at the start of the 21st century, when the city began a public works project to alter the riverfront, engineers noticed cornerstones that seemed to serve no purpose. Experts hypothesized that there was something below the floor and dug through it, leading them to the buried mikve.
At present, the mikve has a combination lock on the entrance, requiring visitors to enter with a guide in possession of the code. Most days, the old bath is only a deep ditch with a puddle, but when the water levels were higher in the city, the mikve would be filled.
A LITTLE less centrally located and far removed from the Middle Ages is the New Synagogue. After World War II had ended, 15 Jewish survivors returned to the city – not many more had survived.
The Soviets, who occupied Erfurt then, as the city was part of East Germany, had also suffered at the hands of the Nazis and perhaps empathized with the Jews. So in 1952, the Soviets permitted the returned Jews to build the New Synagogue.
It was the only structure erected in East Germany during the time of Soviet occupation that would function solely as a synagogue.
These survivors managed to expand their community. Today, however, the Jews of Erfurt are made up mostly of Russian immigrants, as is the case in many Jewish communities in Germany.
The New Synagogue, with its spirit of communistic architecture, is hardly a destination for tourists, but serves as a home for the city’s small congregation.
Benjamin Kochan is the rabbi for Erfurt’s 600 Jews, as well as the spiritual leader for the other 200 Jews scattered around Thuringia. Kochan, a Russian immigrant himself, had always been disconnected from his religious identity as a youngster in the Soviet Union. He didn’t explore his Jewish roots until his family settled down in Germany, where he felt safe to identify as Jewish.
“I think that Germany is one of the most secure countries for Jews, for the moment,” he said, attributing that security to Germany’s acceptance of its guilt for the Holocaust, whereas some neighboring countries that had conspired or collaborated with the Nazis have refused to accept responsibility. “All other countries see themselves as victims after the war,” he said. “In Poland, there were pogroms after the war… [Accepting guilt] means education.”
IT TOOK many decades after the Holocaust for Germany to feel contrite and focus its curriculum on millennia of human rights abuses against Jews. For instance, Kochan had attended German high school after the Cold War and recalled his history teachers glossing over the ’30s and ’40s without mentioning the Holocaust. Or they glorified the Crusades, he explained. When he had asked his teacher about the Jews murdered during the Crusades, the teacher “turned his face [in shame].”
One of the most sobering and more modern sites in Erfurt, delivering the ultimate tragic message, are the former administrative offices of Topf & Sons, the company that designed the ovens to efficiently burn the murdered Jews and many other prisoners at Buchenwald (also near Erfurt). Topf & Sons created many of the crematoriums used in the concentration camps, as well as the necessary accessories for loading corpses into ovens. Today, the offices are a museum, where visitors can witness how a normal German company, normal German people, normal residents of Erfurt – Topf began by producing malting equipment for the beer industry – could be transformed by the rabid antisemitism of the Nazi party.
Documents that discuss gassings at Auschwitz that reveal the company’s knowledge of what their ovens were being used for, and that detail the jobs of engineers, are a few of the many on display.
Today, a new Germany exists: one that is educated and apologetic, one that has established laws to prevent the rise of public antisemitism which is spouted by right-wing radical groups growing popular across Europe. Still, recognizing the dichotomy between past and present in a city like Erfurt is sometimes jarring. At moments, it’s hard to fully comprehend.
Memory is a permanent thing and Erfurt does a decent job of remembering and honoring the five “waves” of Jews.
A sculpture at St. Mary’s Cathedral, the largest church in Erfurt, also serves as a reminder. A wood carving depicts Ecclesia, the common medieval allegorical personification of the church, with a shield emblazoned, charging at Synagoga, who personifies the Jewish religion. Synagoga is riding a pig into battle. Synagoga on the pig represents the Jew, depicted as inept and set to die.
Erfurt is a city that has changed drastically in the last seven decades. Today, however, it is still full of constant reminders that educate and force us to remember, always.
Noah Lederman is the author of the memoir A World Erased: A Grandson’s Search for His Family’s Holocaust Secrets. @NoahLederman