Jewish merchant and trade house Meiningen (1833)

Since the beginning of the 18th century, the Jewish Strupp family had been based near the royal seat of Meiningen, in the neighboring village of Drei&szligacker. In the beginning, they were mainly active in the grain trade, but expanded their business to textiles, especially cotton, linen and silk. Since 1742 the Strupps were also active in banking. A two-story house with a garden in Dreißigacker served as the family's ancestral home. From 1825 at the latest, credit transactions with the ducal court were added, and so the banking house „B. M. Strupp“ took up residence from 1833 in the newly built Jüdisches Kauf- und Gewerbehaus („Basar“) in today's Bernhardstraße 3 – directly north of the city limits.

In order to contain the Jewish peddler trade in the city, the state government and the city administration - much to the displeasure of the non-Jewish competition - had expressed themselves expressly in favor of such a department store. The range of goods offered by the individual store operators was now professionally advertised in newspaper ads. However, despite the enormous importance for the further economic and industrial development of Meiningen, individual Jewish families such as the Strupps were only able to settle in the town with Bürgerrecht after 1856. 1866 followed the establishment of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Meiningen – under its first head Bernhard Meyer Strupp.

The classicist building in the Bernhardstraße 3 was rebuilt several times and soon – until the 1990s – used as a school building („Lutherschule“). In the north wing, the State Theater Meiningen's „Kammerspiele“ opened there in June 2008, right next to the „Gro&szlig Haus“ (Bernhardstraße 5). In the Südflügel is a gallery and an educational institution.