Jewish Offenbach

1707 The Israelite community is constituted. Count Johann Philipp approves the community statutes and the construction of a synagogue. The privilege signed in 1708 allows the community to build its own cemetery on the corner of Bismarckstrasse and Gross-Hasenbach-Strasse.

In 1714, the Frankfurt publisher Seligmann Hirz Reis receives permission to establish a printing house in Offenbach. While Jews were forbidden to print with Hebrew letters in Frankfurt, Offenbach developed into a center of Hebrew letterpress printing. Between 1715 and the early 19th century, more than 200 Hebrew books were published here. Around a quarter of these publications are now in the possession of the city archives.

Around 700 Jews lived in Offenbach in 1784. Since 1719, they have been allowed limited economic activity, for example as traders, butchers or innkeepers.

The first Jewish cemetery had to make way for the new railroad line from Frankfurt to Bebra around 1860. As compensation, the community is given a plot of land to the east of the new (now old) cemetery. Important personalities of Jewish life in Offenbach are buried there, including the city's four honorary Jewish citizens: Salomon Formstecher, Ludo Mayer, Siegfried Guggenheim and Max Willner.

Wolf Breidenbach is also buried there in 1829. As court factor to Prince Carl von Isenburg-Birstein, Breidenbach obtained the abolition of the "Jewish body tax" in 1803, a poll tax for Jewish travelers that violated human dignity and also put Jewish merchants at an economic disadvantage. Numerous German states soon followed Offenbach's example.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jewish community of Offenbach experienced its heyday. The community had 2361 members, including merchants and factory owners, craftsmen, workers and freelancers.

The largest employer in the town at this time was the Mayer & Sohn leather factory. Because of his services as a benefactor and patron of the arts, Ludo Mayer, son of the company founder, becomes the second Jew in Offenbach to be made an honorary citizen in 1915.

After the National Socialists came to power, Hugo Oppenheimer's stately department store on Frankfurter Strasse became "Aryan property" in 1936. The family flees. The owners of the Merzbach bank, founded in 1832, as well as the community chairman and later honorary citizen of Offenbach, lawyer Siegfried Guggenheim, and many others also leave the city.

On the eve of the Second World War, around 900 Jews were still living in Offenbach. Around 450 manage to escape in time. Just as many fall victim to the mass deportations to the extermination camps in 1942/43.

Barely more than a dozen survivors of the Shoah come together in the summer of 1945 to found a Jewish community in Offenbach again. One of them was Max Willner, who later became an honorary citizen.

Today, Offenbach's Jewish community is the second largest in Hesse with around 1,000 members.

Offenbach's first synagogue was probably built around 1707 on the corner of Große Marktstraße and Hintergasse. Until 1822, Große Marktstraße was known as Große Judengasse. But it is not a ghetto. Jews and Christians lived next door to each other in Große and Kleine Judengasse (later Kleine Marktstraße).

The synagogue is mentioned for the first time in the community statute of 1707, when the ruling Count Johann Philipp von Isenburg approves the formation of an independent Jewish community. The original synagogue is destroyed in a fire in the Große Judengasse. The community erects a new building in its place in 1729/1730.

This synagogue, which included a ritual immersion bath ("mikvah"), together with the community hall, formed the center of Jewish life in Offenbach for more than 200 years. In 1751, the community acquired a building nearby in which it set up a hospital.

Rabbi Dr. Salomon Formstecher (1808 - 1889), a pioneer of the Jewish reform movement, preaches and teaches in the synagogue. The town made him Offenbach's first honorary Jewish citizen in 1882. The Jewish community of Offenbach was one of the first to commit itself to the Reform movement as early as 1821. It endeavoured to modernize community life in order to bring the values, norms and rituals of Judaism in line with bourgeois society.

From the late 19th century, the pogroms in Tsarist Russia forced many Jews to flee. Many also come to Offenbach. By 1910, the number of Jewish community members had risen to 2360. The existing synagogue becomes too small.

After the community had already added a women's synagogue in 1832, an additional women's gallery was needed in 1901. In 1902, the mikvah has to make way for a new staircase required by the building authorities.

But this was not enough: in 1916, the old synagogue was abandoned and a new one in Goethestrasse was inaugurated. The former synagogue in Große Judengasse was converted into a cinema in 1919, which was redesigned in the New Objectivity style in 1927.

The new synagogue in Goethestrasse, a monumental domed building with seating for almost 800 people, was intended to symbolize the equality finally achieved by German Jews in the German Empire. Rabbi Dr. Max Dienemann, a tradition-conscious innovator of Jewish piety and an important representative of Jewish liberalism, worked here from 1919.

In 1935, he ordained Regina Jonas from Berlin as the world's first woman rabbi in Offenbach. Dienemann was forced to emigrate in 1938 after being interned in Buchenwald concentration camp. The rabbi dies in Tel Aviv in 1939.

Today, the Jewish Community Center is located in Kaiserstrasse. The first synagogue in Hesse after the Shoah was built there according to designs by architect Hermann Zvi Guttmann and inaugurated in 1956. In 1997, the listed building was extended to 160 seats according to plans by Alfred Jacoby. The community center also includes a kindergarten and a large hall.