10 August 2023

In November 85 years ago, a wave of fire and hatred swept over the long-established Jewish culture, religion and society in the National Socialist Third Reich. More than 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms were burnt down, including the historically valuable half-timbered synagogue of the Jewish community in Ellrich. This has already been dealt with in essays by Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein (1939), Helmut Drechsler (1983) and Dr Peter Kuhlbrodt (1984).

It is also the focus of an essay recently published by Dr Marie-Luis Zahradnik. She heads the project "Digitisation of Jewish cemeteries in northern Thuringia" at Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences, which is funded by the Thuringian State Chancellery. Her guided tours of the Jewish cemetery in Ellrich met with great interest in the history of Jewish life in Ellrich. This also led to contact with Martina Zimmer from Ellrich, who provided photographic material from the estate of Helmut Drechsler for publication.

In commemoration, the essay is dedicated not only to the synagogue, its inscriptions and the mikvah once located in the transverse wing to the synagogue, but also to other aspects of Jewish life in Ellrich. Marie-Luis Zahradnik presents findings from archive sources that have not previously been the subject of literature. The furnishings of the place of worship and the design of the cemetery and gravestones show that the Jewish community in Ellrich, which was founded in modern times, cultivated a rather conservative and orthodox tradition. Like many other old rural communities, the Jewish community in Ellrich was affected by a continuing decline in membership from the second half of the 19th century onwards, with crisis-like consequences for religious practice. The essay, which reconstructs a picture of the development of the Jewish community in Ellrich and its religious sites from archival, literary and visual sources, is available in the Digital Library of Thuringia at https://www.db-thueringen.de/receive/dbt_mods_00058352 retrievable.