City walk Leer (East Frisia)

Soon the synagogue was considered a landmark due to its beautiful construction - Romanesque architectural style with Moorish decorative elements. Since the foundation of the community, services were held in various prayer houses in the city. In 1793, a synagogue room with 100 seats was built in the Pferdemarktstraße, but it soon did not meet the growing demands of the community. In 1885, after two years of construction, the new house of worship on Heisfelder Strasse was solemnly consecrated. In addition to a festive service, the program included a celebratory meal, a concert and a ball. Members of all denominations were invited. A large part of the inventory was taken over from the synagogue in Pferdemarktstraße; in addition, wealthy Jews donated valuable objects to the congregation. The magnificent interior decoration was also mentioned in a travel guide for East Frisia and the surrounding area compiled by Albert Stockvis as being particularly "worth seeing". The rabbi and his family lived in the adjoining house; the mikveh, the ritual immersion bath, is said to have been located in the cellar. In the night of November 9-10, 1938, the synagogue was set on fire by the acting mayor Erich Drescher and some SA members. The local fire department was forbidden to do any extinguishing work. The synagogue burned out completely. In the post-war period, a gas station and a car repair shop were built on the site. In 1961, a memorial plaque was placed on the site. About 20 years later, one of the two commandment tablets that had been above the main entrance of the synagogue was found again. The plaque was discovered in the garden of an SS man who had participated in the November pogrom: he had used it as a step. Today it is in a synagogue in Tel Aviv. A copy of it stands in the Jewish cemetery on Groninger Street. The gas station is now closed and decaying as a ruin.

A large part of the Jewish citizens of the city of Leer earned their living with livestock trade. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were 24 slaughterhouses in Leer, which also offered kosher meat, among others in the house at Mühlenstraße 137. Wolf Nathan Weinberg operated this slaughterhouse together with his son Herbert. They also had a second branch at Königstraße 13. Fortunately, the entire Weinberg family managed to emigrate in time. Herbert was the first to leave his hometown Leer. He emigrated to Cape Town in 1938. His sister Gertrud, married to the son of the then teacher of the Jewish School, followed him a little later. Wolf Weinberg also emigrated to South Africa in 1939. After his home was destroyed in November 1938, he moved into the Jewish school for the interim period until his emigration and slept there on the floor of a schoolroom. Ilse Weinberg, the youngest daughter of the family, first emigrated to London and worked there as a British army nurse during the war, until she finally also moved to Cape Town in 1945.

After Jakob Urbach died in 1928, his eldest son Eduard took over the cigarette factory at Mühlenstraße 14. The small factory where cigars and cigarettes were manufactured was located in the rear part of the building; the front part of the house had a store where the products were sold. Eduard's younger brother Heinrich became a lawyer and, after graduating, took up a position as assessor at the Leer District Court. As a lawyer, he advocated, for example, for the Aussen family, about whose court case we will learn more later. At that time (1936), he was already no longer allowed to be an assessor in the court because of his Jewish origin. He was only allowed to represent Jewish clients. In 1940, Betty and Eduard Urbach were forcibly relocated to a "Judenhaus" at Grunewaldstraße 56 in Berlin. Heinrich had already left his hometown for Berlin in August 1938. From there he supported transports of Jewish children to England. As a reaction to the pogrom night of November 9-10, Great Britain had agreed to take in a total of about 10,000 Jewish children from Germany in the period from mid-November until the beginning of the war in early September 1939, who would otherwise have been threatened with further reprisals by the National Socialists. Through one of these transports, for example, two Jewish siblings from the town of Leer were also brought to safety. These were Louis and Astrid, the children of Jakob Lipmann and Johanne/Johanna(?) Pels, who also ran a butcher shop at Osterstraße 2 (today Mühlenstraße 2). Heinrich was deported in 1943 first to Theresienstadt and later from there to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. His brother Eduard was deported directly from Berlin to Auschwitz a little later. Both siblings met their death in the gas chambers. Their mother Betty died of natural causes in Berlin on January 21, 1943, according to information from the Reichsvereinigung der Juden.

Today there is a fashion store at Mühlenstraße 24 (formerly Osterstraße), and also in the year 1929 Harry Knurr was already running a fashion shop at this location. On July 15, 1929, he took over the business from the late Gerson Pels, who had also previously sold clothing and fabrics here. Of the total of five children of the Knurr couple, two died very early. Inge, then just three months old, had died in a fire in the store in March 1931. Not even ten days earlier, their eight-year-old son Ludolf had died of a serious illness. Both children are buried together in grave 219 in the Jewish Cemetery on Groninger Strasse. The family moved temporarily to 10 Mühlenstrasse, two years later to 23, then to 49 Ubbo-Emmius-Strasse until they finally returned to their home in December 1934. Since some of the city's streets and squares had been renamed by the National Socialist rulers in the meantime, their address was now Hindenburgstraße 24. The memorial square we passed on our way here a few moments ago, for example, bore the name "Adolf-Hitler-Platz" during this time. On January 3, 1939, the Knurr family decided to leave Germany for good. The parents Harry and Goldina and their youngest son Ludwig took a ship from the port of Bremen to New York. The children Beate and Arno followed them from Hamburg. The entire family survived the Holocaust in the USA.

The house at Mühlenstraße 17 (formerly: Osterstraße 17) was replaced by a new building. The original building was identical to the adjoining house on the left, which still stands today. In 1864, Jacob Nathan Gans had opened the business as a watchmaker's and gold and silverware shop, which he inherited to his son Hermann after his death. Jacob N. Gans is buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Groninger Street. The whole family managed to emigrate to New York via Le Havre in France on the steamer "De Grasse" in 1938. From Wilhelmshaven, the Gestapo wrote to the Leer local police department on August 13, 1938: "Insofar as the Gans family intends to emigrate to America, there are no grounds here for revoking the passport. It is assumed that the tax matters have been settled, I am to be informed in due course about the departure that has taken place [...]." The children Karla and Manfred were 18 and 14 years old at this time. Manfred Gans, about whom more will be told in the further course of the city tour, was a guest in Leer in 1995 and expressed himself in an interview conducted by the Ostfriesen-Zeitung on the question about his home as follows: "My home is New York. Our five children and our 15 grandchildren live there. But the city where you were born always has a special place in your heart. My family lived here for a long time. We were East Frisians. [...] Of course, my parents were very patriotic, and my father had been at the front in France for four years in World War I." Hermann Gans' skill as a clockmaker is still evidenced by the large Art Nouveau-style clock mounted on the bank building opposite. It was his journeyman's piece and hung on the outside wall of his store until the family emigrated.

In the Rathausstraße 22-24 lived Alfred Aussen with his wife Paula . Her father Louis Aron ran a manufactory and fashion goods shop here. On March 8, 1936, the only daughter of the family was born. One day after the birth, her father was found in the town hall. In memory of the child's grandmothers (Lina and Selma) they decided on Liesel. However, the registration of this name was refused by the registrar on duty on the grounds that it was a German first name and that the girl was not allowed to bear it because of her Jewish faith - moreover, as a Dutch citizen. After the Leer District Court and the District Administrator were called in, the registrar was finally instructed to allow the first name Lisel (instead of Liesel) to be registered, since "the Jews living in the German Reich were not yet restricted by legal provisions regarding the use of German first names [in 1936]". Lisel spent the first two years of her life in Leer. The living situation of her family worsened enormously during this time - her grandfather Louis Aron soon had to close his store because customers were not coming. In May 1938, Alfred Aussen moved with his family to nearby Winschoten in Holland, hoping to lead a better life there. The grandparents decided to stay behind in their house in Rathausstraße for the time being, as they did not want to leave their hometown. The house was destroyed during the November pogroms. Shortly thereafter it was taken over by the city of Leer, and now Louis and Karolina Aron also moved to Winschoten. Four years later they were deported from here to Sobibor via the transit camp Westerbork. The entire family was killed. Liesel was just seven years old. To commemorate her fate, the nearby square where Kirchstrasse, Brunnenstrasse and Rathausstrasse meet will soon be named "Liesel-Aussen-Platz."

David Hirschberg was on the board of the synagogue community for many years. Nine years after his marriage to Esther, née Cohen, he opened an inn in Kampstraße in 1909. After the completion of the new cattle yard on the Nesse (now Ostfrieslandhalle), he took over the inn on the site in 1927, until he finally ran out of customers due to the restrictive laws of the National Socialists and had to close the inn. After the destruction of the synagogue in 1938, the Jews who remained in Leer secretly held services in the upper rooms of the house at Kampstraße 37. After the Jewish school building in Ubbo-Emmius-Strasse was purchased by the city in June 1939, the Jewish community was forced to vacate the building with the few financial resources they now had. From then on, Hirschberg, the head of the synagogue, provided rooms in his house so that the children would still have the opportunity to be taught. The last teacher of the synagogue community, Seligmann Hirschberg, also lived here together with his wife Goldina, until the so-called eviction order forced them to move to Frankfurt am Main. There the couple lived until they were finally deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. The Jewish community in Leer quickly disintegrated after the November pogroms. In the course of 1938, the "Aryanization" of Jewish property was completed and Jewish citizens were deprived of their possessions. In 1939, the city's Jews were forced to live in so-called Judenhäuser (Jewish houses), including one at Kampstraße 37. Another "Judenhaus" is said to have been located at Pferdemarktstraße 22. In January 1940, the Gestapo headquarters in Wilhelmshaven issued the order that all Jews had to leave East Frisia by April 1, 1940. David Hirschberg, his wife Esther and their five children were the last Jewish family to leave Leer on March 20, 1940. After that, the town was declared "free of Jews". Their former house was henceforth used as a "ghetto" for the Jews of the region, who had to live there crammed into a very small space. From here, the remaining Jewish population was taken to the extermination camps in the "East". After the forced departure from his hometown of Leer, Hirschberg and his family managed to emigrate to Argentina in May 1941, where they survived the Holocaust together.

When the Jewish community was founded in Leer, it probably did not yet have its own cemetery, and initially buried deceased members in the Jewish cemetery in Aurich. According to a tradition from the year 1822, a separate cemetery was finally established outside the city limits between Leer and Leerort in the first third of the 17th century. The site was located near the gallows, which is why it appears in the synagogue books as "Galgenhöchte". The designation "Israeli Cemetery" did not become established until the beginning of the 20th century. During the Nazi era, there were several incidents of harassment during burials of Jewish community members. At the funeral of Jakob Pels from Leer, the city ordered at the last minute that the horses that were to pull the hearse be unhitched, leaving the mourners no other option than to pull the hearse themselves the almost four kilometer long way through the city to the cemetery. The records end with the burial of Sophie Rosenboom on June 11, 1939. After Leer was declared "free of Jews" in 1940, the cemetery was cleared and some of the gravestones removed. These were re-erected elsewhere after the end of the war. In 1951, the cemetery became the property of the Jewish Trust Corporation, which later transferred the property to the city of Leer and the Landesverband der Jüdischen Gemeinden in Niedersachsen. Between 1946 and 1985, a total of six Jewish people who had returned to their hometown of Leer after the end of the war were buried in the younger part of the cemetery, which had been added after an expansion of the grounds in 1896. Today, 237 gravestones can still be found in the Jewish Cemetery. In addition, a memorial plaque was placed here in memory of the former Jewish community. Another, smaller cemetery with 13 preserved gravestones is located in Leer-Loga at Logaer Weg 224 / corner Eichendorffstraße.

Since at the beginning of the 17th century still no own synagogue existed, the services initially took place in a building in the Kirchstraße. In his "Chronicle of Leer", the pastor Wessel Onken reports in 1765 about the first Jewish prayer house in the city: "Formerly formed the Kaaksbrunnen zugekehrte half of the pack house of Mr. Ch. G. Theune located in Kirchstraße - then called "the three crowns" - a kind of synagogue," it says here. The other half of the house served as living quarters for an unnamed Jewish citizen. A latticework separated the interior of the house into two parts. The front part was reserved for women, the back part for men. The latter was also used to store all kinds of utensils such as prayer lecterns, candlesticks and the like. As the congregation gradually grew, the previous prayer house soon became too small and the search for a suitable larger building began. In 1766 Meyer Isaacs bought a plot of land at Dreckstraße 2 (today Norderstraße), which from then on was to be used - as he said -  "for the whole community" as a synagogue building. In the front part there was his residential house, in the back part the synagogue was built, which differed "by size and shape far from the old building". However, the Jewish community received explicit instructions to acquire "another building for the synagogue in a secluded street" within a period of ten years, "since there is no more secluded place in the whole area than where the synagogue now stands." Nevertheless, the congregation was able to continue using the building until 1794, when plans finally began for the first synagogue building of its own.

In 1803, the community opened a first Jewish elementary school in Leer, which was probably located in Kirchstraße. In the opening year, the school was attended by 17 children, who were taught by a teacher from Posen. School attendance was compulsory for children of the community members. In October 1909, the community finally acquired a plot of land at Deichstraße 12 (today Ubbo-Emmius-Straße) and erected a school building there with an accompanying teacher's apartment. Three years later, the building was completed and could be attended by about 25 children from then on. Due to a shortage of teachers during World War I, the teacher Lasser Abt was ordered to the city's state elementary school, whereupon the Jewish school had to close for a year. During the period of the Weimar Republic, the number of students continued to drop, so that in 1926 only 16 children attended the school. During the so-called Reich Pogrom Night, the doors of the school building were broken down by four SA members with hatchets, the apartment of the teacher Seligmann Hirschberg and his wife was stormed and both spouses were violently beaten. Despite the damage to the building, the school rooms were henceforth used to hold church services. After the forced closure of the school, the congregation was forced to sell the building to the city of Leer in the summer of 1939. From then on, the remaining students were taught in David Hirschberg's house in Kampstraße before it was completely closed on February 23, 1940. In 2011, the district of Leer acquired the building in order to restore it according to old plans. On September 1, 2013, the Former Jewish School opened as a cultural and memorial site. "As the last stone witness of the synagogue community of Leer, it is dedicated to the memory of the Jewish population from the district," says the homepage. The city walk ends at this point. Gladly, the tour can be combined with a visit to the permanent exhibition in the memorial.