Jewish School (Oldenburg)

In 1935, the state rabbi Leo Trepp decided for various reasons that a Jewish school had to be established for all Jews*Jewesses from Oldenburg and the surrounding area.

It finally opened in October 1937 with 50 pupils* and two teachers, Moses Katzenberg and Alexander Freund, in the Jewish community center, right next to the synagogue at Peterstraße 6.

In order to prepare the pupils* for emigration in the best possible way, foreign language teaching played an exceptionally important role.
Since many children came from the surrounding area of Oldenburg and could not be expected to travel by train every day, they were accommodated in Jewish families in the city during the week.
From the beginning, the number of pupils* steadily decreased, which was significantly increased by the wave of refugees that began after the November pogrom.

Just over a year after the opening, on the night of November 9-10, 1938, the Nazis burned down both the  synagogue and the school.

In the film interview, former student Ruth Simon Heinemann recounts how she arrived at her burned-down school on the morning of Nov. 10, 1938.

Because the two teachers had been taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp andand new premises were needed, classes were suspended for the next two months. Initially, Staustraße 12 was considered as a new location for the school, whereupon a neighbor wrote a letter of complaint to the mayor of Oldenburg.

Just a few months later, the Jewish school moved to Alteneschstraße 15 until it had to give way to a Nazi organization in August 1939 and moved to Kurwickstraße 5. Only a dark room of 6sqm was available for the teaching of twelve children. Nevertheless, the school retained this location until it moved to Staulinie 17 on December 19, 1939. Here it remained until its dissolution  (relocation to Hamburg) on April 1, 1940.