Israelite Horticultural School Ahlem

The Israelitische Gartenbauschule Ahlem was a Jewish school founded in 1893 as the "Israelitische Erziehungsanstalt zu Ahlem bei Hannover". It served as a supra-regional, boarding school educational institution for horticulture and various trades. Its students came from all over Germany, from Eastern Europe, and occasionally even from Palestine and other countries; its graduates were soon to be found all over Europe, in Palestine, North and South America, and in the German colonies. The founder was the Hanoverian banker Alexander Moritz Simon. In order to improve their social situation, Jewish  students were to learn practical-commercial professions here, which had traditionally been denied them ("occupational reclassification").

After 1933, Ahlem assumed the function of preparation for emigration - an importance that became life-saving for many students. Although education in Ahlem was maintained to a limited extent until Jewish schools were banned in July 1942, from the end of 1941 the buildings served as a central collection point for the deportation of Jews from the administrative districts of Hanover and Hildesheim. Then, in October 1943, the Gestapo itself set up shop in Ahlem, taking over the directors' house for its infamous "foreigners' department" and, a little later, setting up a prison in the main building.

After their liberation, Jewish survivors of the Shoa established an agricultural kibbutz in Ahlem. The last of them emigrated to Palestine in early 1948. In 1952, the land was transferred to the Jewish Trust Corporation, which sold it to the Lower Saxony Chamber of Agriculture in 1955.

Since 1987, the Ahlem Memorial of the Hanover Region has existed in the historic director's house of the former horticultural school. In 2014, it was reopened after reconstruction with an expanded  permanent exhibition.