Museum of Jewish Antiquities

The property was acquired by Amschel Mayer von Rothschild in 1809 and built on by the architect Philipp Jacob Hoffmann with a representative building in the style of Frankfurt Classicism. From 1813, it functioned as the trading office of the company M. A. Rothschild & Söhne. The location and character of the building reveal much about the social status of the Rothschild family at the time. Historian Lisbeth Ehlers wrote: “The house at the interface between the former Judengasse and the city (...) underlined the Rothschilds' claim to belong to Frankfurt's upper middle class.” The Rothschild banking house was liquidated after the death of Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild in 1901. According to his will, the office building at Fahrgasse 146 was transferred to the Jewish community with the proviso that a museum be set up on one floor. The first floor housed the community library and the archives of the Jewish community. The museum of Jewish antiquities was set up on the second floor. The second and third floors housed the municipal administration and the meeting rooms of the municipal board and the municipal council. The Museum of Jewish Antiquities existed from 1922 to 1938. In the permanent exhibition and the temporary exhibitions, objects were used to convey “aesthetic enjoyment of art and cultural-historical background knowledge from Frankfurt's Jewish history” (Rauschenberger 2006). Loans and donations came from the Rothschild family and the Frankfurt Historical Museum, among others. In 1936, a special room was set up for the Jewish cult objects of the art collector Sigmund Nauheim, which mainly consisted of Hanukkah candlesticks, Besamim boxes and Etrog boxes. The building and interior were vandalized and looted on the night of November 9-10, 1938. The art and religious objects were confiscated by the Secret State Police. Parts of the collection came into the possession of the “Stadtgeschichtliches Museum”. The two curators working at the Museum of Jewish Antiquities, Hermann Gundersheimer and Guido Schönberger, fled from the National Socialists into exile in the USA in 1939. The looted objects went to various Jewish organizations and institutions as part of the restitution process. Today, individual items from the collection of the Museum of Jewish Antiquities are kept and exhibited in the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. The house at Fahrgasse 146, built between 1810 and 1813, was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War and leveled in the 1950s. Today, the building would be located roughly between house numbers 57 and 65 on Zeil.