Jewish Museum Frankfurt

The New Jewish Cemetery at Eckenheimer Landstrasse 238 was built in 1928/29 according to plans by the government architect Fritz Nathan. The austere cubic architecture follows the New Building style prevailing at the time, while at the same time reverting to classical elements such as portico, axiality, and peristyle. The only facade decoration is the wall bond of red-brown Dutch clinker.

The Jewish cemetery at Rat-Beil-Strasse 10 forms the southern end of the main cemetery and has been used since the closure of the old Jewish burial ground Battonnstrasse from 1828 - 1928. On the 74,000 square meter large area there are approximately 30,000 - 40,000 graves.

The first burials in the Battonnstraße Jewish Cemetery can be dated to 1272 on the basis of a few gravestones. This makes it one of the oldest of its kind in Europe. In Judaism, the cemetery is considered an eternal resting place; for this reason, the graves may not be dissolved, nor may the gravestones be removed. If no other land is available, earth is piled up in order to be able to bury the dead on top of each other.

The Museum Judengasse is located in the building complex of the municipal utility center on the . In 1985, Swiss architect Ernst Gisel is commissioned to design a new administrative and service building on the site of the former Jewish ghetto. The result is an architecture whose 140-meter-long arcade front is dominated by a sweeping curved ridge line.

The Jewish Museum is housed in the former upper middle-class residence of the Rothschild family and one of the neighboring buildings at Am Untermainkai 14-15. The city architect Johann F. Chr. Hess erected the two buildings in 1820/21 in the classicist style. After Mayer Carl von Rothschild acquired the house in 1846, he had it enlarged by the architect Friedrich Rumpf and furnished with a representative, stately interior. Rumpf coined with his decor "Le goût Rothschild", the Rothschild taste, which still defines part of the premises today.

The Philanthropin, founded in 1804 as a "place of humanity" by the Frankfurt Jewish community, moves into its new quarters at Hebelstrasse 15-19 in 1908. The Berlin magistrate Georg Matzdoff, together with the engineer Ernst Hiller, is awarded the contract for a new school building in the neo-Renaissance style.

A hundred years ago, it was founded as a synagogue for the liberal stream of Judaism, whose adherents increasingly settled in the West End at the beginning of the 20th century.

Today, the large main room serves as an Orthodox synagogue, while at the same time all directions within the Jewish community find their home in the building. Neither the Pogrom Night nor the 2nd World War could destroy the Westend Synagogue completely, thus the reconstruction can take place already 1948 - 1950 by the architects Max Kemper, Werner Hebebrand in cooperation with Hans Leistikow.

Old Jewish Cemetery  

The first burials in the Jewish Cemetery  Battonnstraße can be dated by a few gravestones to the year 1272. This makes it one of the oldest of its kind in Europe. In Judaism, the cemetery is considered an eternal resting place, and for this reason the graves may neither be dissolved nor the gravestones removed. When the capacities there are exhausted, he must be closed in 1828 with almost 7000 graves.