Street & Locale Names

In some of the houses in the marketplace, Jewish businessmen sold the most diverse goods until 1938.

Last sold Adolf Meyer (No. 8) shoes as well as leather goods and the department store Josef Bodenheimer (No. 1 u. 3 / corner Rosenstraße) textiles. Siegmund Schaumburger (No. 7 / corner Werkes) offered men's clothing too.

Isaak Hess was born in Lauchheim on May 26, 1789. He attended a rabbinical school in Fürth and then worked for several years as a tutor and bookkeeper. In 1817 he founded his own antiquarian bookshop in Lauchheim. In 1838, he moved his antiquarian bookshop to Ellwangen and expanded it with an assortment bookstore. The emancipation efforts of the Württemberg Jews were of particular concern to him. He was a member of a government commission that prepared a law on the political and civil rights of Jews in Württemberg.

Among the known villages and smaller towns in Baden Württemberg, where Jewish settlements existed for shorter or longer periods in the 16th or 17th century, was the village of Röttingen.

Excerpt from the "Description of the Oberamts Neresheim" from the year 1872, last line in the place description "Röttingen": "Jews were once also in Röttingen, still a village street is called the Judengasse."

The Judensteg was a wooden footbridge over the river Kaczawa. The name of the bridge "Judensteg" has its origin in the fact that in the immediate vicinity on the right bank of the river is a Jewish cemetery. In 1903-1904, the "Kaiser Friedrich Brücke" was built in place of the "Judensteg".