City walk Sondershausen

During an archaeological excavation in 1998/99, the remains of a medieval mikvah were found on the western edge of the old city center. In Judaism, these immersion pools are used for the ritual cleansing of men and especially women, and are used after an illness, childbirth or menstruation.

The plain rectangular groundwater basin with stair access was originally about 1.6 m deep and was discovered and uncovered under a Baroque well shaft. Accompanying finds allow to date the construction of the basin to the late 13th century. It was thus constructed before the founding of the city and the erection of the oldest city wall ring around 1300. Traces of destruction suggest its abandonment around the middle of the 14th century, probably in connection with the plague pogroms of 1349, which also raged in Sondershausen. The pogroms spread from southern France, partly even before the plague occurred. Jews were murdered and persecuted with the accusation of having poisoned the wells and caused the plague.

The ritual bath on Bebrastrasse belongs to the type of cellar mikvahs, which were simple bathing pools inside buildings. On the western side of the (no longer existing superstructure) ran the city wall. After 1349, the mikveh seems to have fallen into oblivion. The basin is still fed by groundwater and was probably covered with a well in the course of the 17th century. The Jewish community, which was newly established in the residential town at the end of the 17th century, probably did not know about this mikvah. According to written sources, they used a currently unlocatable mikvah in another private house. For the 19th century there is evidence of a Jewish bathhouse in the eastern part of the old town. The Sondershausen mikvah, along with the mikvah found in 2007 near the Krämerbrücke in Erfurt, is one of the oldest preserved Jewish ritual baths in Central Germany. It was preserved in situ with part of the adjacent city wall foundation and integrated into the new construction of the shopping center "Galerie am Schlossberg". The exhibition received the monument award of the state of Thuringia in 2002.

The Jewish community held its services in private houses in Sondershausen since the admission of Schutzjuden in 1695. In most cases, the officiating court Jew or court factor of the prince made his house available for this purpose as well as for teaching the children. During the 18th century, the number of congregation members fluctuated between three and thirteen families. The Jews still had to pay protection money and were subject to special legislation. It was not until the constitutional work of 1849 that the country's Jews were granted civil rights.

After 1800, the number of congregation members grew and with it the need for a separate place for worship increased. In 1825/26, the congregation, which by then consisted of 26 families, built a synagogue at Bebrastrasse 6. It stood on the property behind the community-owned schoolhouse and was accessible via the front building and the adjacent courtyard. The plastered half-timbered building comprised a plain hall with a gallery and was inaugurated after a one-year construction period on September 1, 1826.

From 1845 until his death in 1906, Rabbi Philipp Heidenheim preached and taught here. He preached in German and the service was accompanied by instrumental music. Around the middle of the 19th century, about 40 families belonged to the Jewish community of Sondershausen, after which the number of community members decreased due to deaths and people moving away, so that after Philipp Heidenheim's death in 1906, the rabbinical position was no longer filled.

Until its desecration on November 9, 1938, the synagogue remained the spiritual and religious center of the community. During the bombing of Sondershausen on April 8, 1945, it was severely damaged and also demolished during the demolition of the houses Bebrastraße 6 to 8 around 1960. The area lay fallow until the construction of the "Galerie am Schlossberg" shopping center built over the former old town site in 2001/2002. Today, a memorial plaque on the west facade of the new building commemorates the former location of the synagogue and its fate.

Philipp Heidenheim was born in Bleicherode on June 14, 1814, the son of a peddler. He distinguished himself early on by his eagerness to learn and his talent, and received instruction from a private tutor in the home of a wealthy Bleicherode banking family. He then graduated from the Erfurt teacher training seminar and in 1834 joined the Jewish school in Sondershausen as an assistant teacher. Already in 1837, at the age of 23, he took over the school administration and the office of preacher.

In 1839 he married Lina, the daughter of the court agent and former community leader David Leser. With her he had six children. When in 1840 the Jewish school was affiliated with the municipal school institutions and reduced to religious instruction, Heidenheim received a position as a teacher at the princely secondary school in 1841.

Privately, Heidenheim maintained a Jewish boarding school for boys since 1842 with the support of his family, which was located at Bebrastrasse 6. There also the Israelite religious education for the Jewish children from Sondershausen was given. Due to its good reputation, the institute also attracted numerous students from abroad. After several years of self-study, Heidenheim passed the rabbinical examination in 1845 and was appointed rabbi of the Jewish community of Sondershausen. From 1847, Israelite religious instruction took place in the municipal school buildings in Pfarrstraße, and from 1903 in the school building in Güntherstraße.

The Realschule, where Heidenheim taught, was the city's most attended school in 1852 (256 students). In 1881, it moved with the Gymnasium into the newly built school building at Güntherstraße 58 (today's Geschwister-Scholl-Gymnasium). In the same year, Philipp Heidenheim was appointed professor after forty years of service. Five years later, he retired in 1886. He was considered an excellent educator. As a rabbi, he advocated contemporary reforms and decisively promoted the Jewish emancipation process in the principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen. He died on his 92nd birthday and was buried in the town's Jewish cemetery.

After his elevation to the rank of imperial prince in 1697, Count Christian Wilhelm von Schwarzburg-Sondershausen operated a court worthy of a prince in his residence town Sonderhausen at great expense. In this context, he also employed a court Jew or court factor, who took care of the procurement of money and luxury goods. Many Jews had widely scattered family and business connections, as they were often only allowed to stay in one place for a limited time. In Sondershausen, some Jewish families were granted the status of Schutzjuden in 1695. They paid the associated right of residence, which had to be renewed annually, with protection money.

Alexander Cantor was the first court Jew in Sondershausen and part of a Jewish community. In 1698 a prayer room as well as a school were attested in documents and in 1699 the purchase of an area for a Jewish burial place south of the city at the Spatenberg. Cantor lived in a house on the western Bebrastraße and made his house available to the Jewish community for services and school. The same was done by his successor, Philipp Abraham Wallich, who lived in a house at the northwest end of Bebrastraße.

As a lender and merchant in princely service, Wallich came into a considerable fortune. This made him a target of the robber chief Loth and his gang, who operated from the nearby Kyffhäuser Mountains. One November night in 1720, the gang entered Wallich's house, overpowered the occupants, and robbed him of coins worth 26,000 talers, as well as jewels, pearls, and objects made of gold and silver. The sovereign and Prince of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen responded to this brazen raid by deploying military forces; by offering a bounty, Loth was lured into a trap and captured. After Wallich's death, the merchants Hirsch Moyses and Abraham Levi took his position as Jewish court factors of the prince. The Jewish court factors provided significant financial support in building up the economic and intellectual life of the royal seat.

In 1903, Samuel and Sara Simon opened a department store for manufactured goods and men's and boys' ready-to-wear clothing at Lohstraße 26/27. They had moved from Nordhausen to Sondershausen shortly before with their four children Max, Siegfried, Margarete and Arthur. After the early death of her husband in 1907, Sara Simon continued to run the business independently and raised the children. In 1920, she moved to Blankenhain (Weimar) to join her son Max, who was injured in World War 1 and ran a ready-to-wear clothing store there.

In Sondershausen, the younger sons took over the parental business. Siegfried ran the parent company at Lohstraße 26/27 and Arthur founded his own store at Lohstraße 12 in 1925. In 1923, sister Margarete moved to Cologne and Arthur married Zlata Laub, a clerk from Przemyśl, Poland. Siegfried married Rosa Edelmuth in 1930. He was active as a member of the board of the Israelite community.

When business went from bad to worse after the Nazi takeover, Arthur and Zlata rented out the house and business in 1938 and temporarily went to Hamburg with their daughter. After the Pogrom Night in 1938, Arthur's family managed to emigrate to Shanghai in February 1939. Siegfried, however, tried in vain to leave the country with his family in spring 1941.

With the exception of Arthur, Zlata and their daughter Ruth, who survived in Shanghai, the entire Simon family was murdered in the Shoa. Klara and Herta, wife and daughter of Max Simon in Blankenhain, who was a participant in the war and a recipient of the Iron Cross and had already died in 1931, were deported to Bełżyce on May 10, 1942, via the Weimar reception camp. They died in the Lublin district. With the same transport, Siegfried, Rosa and Heinz Simon, also had to leave Sondershausen and went to their death. The sister Margarete, living in Cologne, her husband Isidor and their children Irmgard and Kurt, who had fled to Belgium in 1938/39, were deported with different transports on August 25 and October 31, 1942 from the collective camp Mechelen to Auschwitz. The very elderly mother of the four siblings, Sara Simon, née Kirchheimer, who last lived in Erfurt, was also taken to Theresienstadt on September 19, 1942, where she died a month later.

The German Reich confiscated the residential and commercial building at Lohstraße 26/27 in May 1942 "by virtue of a loss of assets due to expatriation" (11th decree to the Reich Citizenship Law of Nov. 1941) and sold it in September of the same year. It was destroyed in the bombing raid on Sondershausen on April 8, 1945, as was the house at Lohstraße 12. Ruth Simon now lives with her family in Israel. To the memory of the Simon family, the town of Sondershausen dedicated the first six Stolpersteine laid in the town area in 2012.

The company "Gebr. Redelmeier", founded in 1820, was one of the most traditional trading businesses in the town of Sondershausen. David Moses Redelmeier already lived in the town at the end of the 18th century as a merchant, cantor and teacher. The house in Hauptstraße 36 (formerly 55) was owned by the family since the middle of the 19th century at the latest. Here the family successfully operated a cut and fashion shop for generations.

Max Redelmeier, born in 1884 as the third of five children, was the last owner of the company. He married Henny Schönland, a daughter of the merchant Salomo Schönland from Frankenhausen, in 1922. After the birth of daughters Ilse and Ruth, he succeeded his father Hermann around 1924, who moved into a house at Marienstraße 75 with his wife Rosalie and daughter Meta Redelmeier. Hermann was the head of the Jewish community for a long time. The cohesion in the family remained close. The girls often stayed with their grandparents and aunt, where they received friends and participated in the weekly home music lessons.

After the Nazis came to power and the "boycott of Jews" of April 1, 1933, it became difficult for Max Redelmeier to maintain the family business. At school, the two girls felt the anti-Semitic political climate. After the death of his mother in March 1938, Max Redelmeier began to prepare the emigration of the family. However, he did not succeed in selling his property at its market value. After the pogrom night of November 9, 1938, Max Redelmeier was arrested along with eleven other Jewish citizens of the town and interned for two weeks in the Buchenwald concentration camp. When he returned, he sold his house for far less than its value on December 5, 1938, and left Sondershausen with his wife and children and his sister Meta Redelmeier for Palestine on December 29, 1938. They reached Haifa on January 10, 1939. Two years after his arrival, Max Redelmeier died in Tel Aviv.

The Jewish cemetery on Spatenberg was established in 1699, when Count Christian Wilhelm von Schwarzburg-Sondershausen accepted Jewish citizens as patron Jews in the town. In 1699, court factor Alexander Cantor acquired an orchard on Spatenberg in the south of the town for himself and the Jewish community as a burial ground. His own gravestone from 1726 has been preserved and is one of the oldest stelae in the Sondershausen cemetery. In 1885 the completely occupied burial ground was extended to the east. It is located to the right of the (today's) entrance. In the very east a small building was erected, probably a Tahara hall for washing the deceased. Today about 180 gravestones and some fragments are preserved. 52 stelae have been anonymized, as their inscriptions are no longer legible. In the older, western part, the gravestones are loosely distributed over the site. They are made of limestone or sandstone and kept simple, the inscriptions are mostly bilingual (German and Hebrew). In the older stones the Hebrew ones are partly extensive; some have German inscriptions on the back. In the newer part the gravestones are often made of black granite, partly plain, partly more elaborate. For the most part all stelae are oriented to the east.

The cemetery was not desecrated in 1938, and also not leveled in 1943/44, because no buyer was found. Since 1952 the city of Sondershausen is responsible for the care of the cemetery property. In 1988 the cemetery was repaired and probably the very dilapidated Tahara Hall was demolished. On its foundations the city erected a memorial stone for the victims of National Socialism. In 1998 the cemetery was listed as a historical monument. Repeatedly the burial place was the target of desecrations, so in the years 1968, 1980, 1990 and 2003.

In addition to the mikvah, which was rediscovered in 1999, the Jewish cemetery is the only preserved Jewish cult institution in Sondershausen. An expert tour is possible by arrangement with the castle museum, which also published a detailed documentation of the cemetery analog and digital.