A Short History of the Jews of Munich, Germany

A Short History of the Jews of Munich [1]


In the second half of the 13th century Munich appears to have had a sizable Jewish community; the Jews lived in their own quarter and possessed a synagogue, a ritual bath, and a hospital.

On Oct. 12, 1285, in the wake of a blood libel, 180 Jews who had sought refuge in the synagogue were burnt to death; the names of 68 of the victims are listed in the Nuremberg Memorbuch, which dates from 1296.

The Jews obtained permission to rebuild the synagogue in 1287, but for several centuries they remained few in number and suffered from various restrictions, which from time to time were further exacerbated (e.g., in 1315 and 1347).

During the Black Death (1348/49) the community was again annihilated. However, by 1369 there were Jews in the city once more, and in 1375 Duke Frederick of Bavaria granted them (and the other Jews resident in Upper Bavaria) the privilege of paying customs duties at the same rate as non-Jews.

The remission of debts owed to Jews ordained by Emperor Wenceslaus (1378–1400) resulted in Munich Jews losing all their assets. They also suffered severely in 1413, when they were accused of desecration of the Host.

In 1416 the small community was granted some privileges, including permission to acquire a lot for a cemetery; in 1432, when Duke Albert III sought to impose a special tax on Munich Jews, the results were disappointing.

The clergy succeeded in having all the Jews of Upper Bavaria expelled in 1442, and eight years later they were also driven out of Lower Bavaria, where they had taken temporary refuge. Duke Albert gave the Munich synagogue (in the modern Gruftgasse) to Johann Hartlieb, a physician, and it was subsequently converted into a church.

For almost three centuries Jews were excluded from Munich and Bavaria (although there may have been some periods when their residence was permitted, as may be deduced from a renewal of the ban announced in a 1553 police ordinance).

During the Austrian occupation, Jews were readmitted to Bavaria and some of them presumably found their way to Munich. At any rate, a new decree issued on March 22, 1715, again ordered them to leave the country.

Some ten years later, a few Jews who had business dealings with the Bavarian count began to settle in Munich, and by 1728 several Jews resided in the city. In 1729 (or 1734) the Court Jew, Wolf Wertheimer, took up residence there and was joined by his family in 1742; in 1750 all Court Jews and Jews in possession of passes granting them freedom of movement were excepted from the general ban on Jewish entry into the city. A community was formed by Jews who maintained connections with the court. Of the 20 of them in 1750, there was only one woman and a single child, which attests to the temporary and migratory nature of the settlement.

Except for these Schutzjuden, the only Jews permitted to reside in the city were those who had been commissioned as purveyors or who had made loans to the state; all others were permitted to stay in the city for a short while only and had to pay a substantial body tax (Leibzoll).

This situation continued for most of the 18th century, and it was not until 1794 and 1798 that the number of women and children in the city was commensurate with the number of heads of families. In 1794 there were 153 Jews, including 27 heads of families, 28 women, and 70 children; in 1798 the respective figures were 35, 33, and 98. Up to the end of the 18th century, Jewish women had to go to Kriegshaber to give birth to their children, and it was not until 1816 that Jews were permitted to bury their dead in Munich rather than transport them to Kriegshaber for burial.

At this time Munich Jews earned their livelihood as contractors for the army and the royal mint (see mint-masters), merchants dealing in luxury wares and livestock, moneylenders, and peddlers. Since there was no legal basis for their residence in Munich, they did not have the right to practice their religion, and every year they had to pay a special tax to enable them to observe Sukkot.

In 1805 a "Regulation for Munich Jewry" was issued (it formed the basis for the Bavarian Judenmatrikel of 1813); among other privileges, the Jews were permitted to inherit the right of domicile, to conduct services, and to reside in all parts of the city.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the number of Jews was augmented by immigrants, and by 1814 there were 451 Jews in the city. Two years later, the Jewish community was formally organized. In the same year the community was given permission to establish a cemetery, and in 1824 a permit was issued for the construction of a synagogue (dedicated in 1827).

The first Jewish religious school was founded in 1815 and a private one in 1817. The community played a leading part in Bavarian Jewry's struggle for civil rights, which lasted up to the founding of the German Reich (1871); delegates of the Bavarian communities frequently met in Munich (1819, 1821) to make common representations to the government. In the second half of the century the community grew further (from 842 in 1848 to 4,144 in 1880, and 8,739 in 1900) as a result of increased immigration from the smaller communities (especially in the last few decades of the 19th century).

By 1910, some 20% of Bavarian Jews lived in the capital (11,000). There was also a steady immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe, mainly from Galicia, which lasted up to World War I.

Jews were prominent in the cultural life of Munich, a center of German arts, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, as well as being more equally represented in Bavarian political affairs than in other German states. After World War I a revolutionary government on the Soviet model was formed, in which Kurt Eisner, Eugene Levine, and Gustav Landauer were prominent. It was routed by counterrevolutionary forces, and a "White Terror" against Communists, Socialists, and Jews was instigated.

In the postwar years of economic and political upheaval, Munich was a hotbed of antisemitic activity and the cradle of the Nazi party; many Jews from Eastern Europe were forced to leave Munich. Sporadic antisemitic outbursts characterized the years until the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, when Reinhold Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler took control of the police; the first concentration camp, Dachau, was erected near Munich.

At the time, the community numbered 10,000 persons, including an independent Orthodox community and many cultural, social, and charitable organizations. Munich Jewry was subjected to particularly vicious and continuous acts of desecration, discrimination, terror, and boycotts but responded with a Jewish cultural and religious revival.

Between 1933 and May 15, 1938, some 3,574 Jews left Munich. On July 8, 1938, the main synagogue was torn down on Hitler's express orders. During the Kristallnacht, two synagogues were burnt down, 1,000 male Jews were arrested and interned in Dachau, and one was murdered. The communal center was completely ransacked.

During the war a total of 4,500 Jews were deported from Munich (3,000 of them to Theresienstadt); only about 300 returned; 160 managed to outlive the war in Munich. A new community was founded in 1945 by former concentration camp inmates, refugees, displaced persons, and local Jews. In the following five years, about 120,000 Jews, refugees, and displaced persons passed through Munich on their way to Israel. In 1946 there were 2,800.

The community increased from 1,800 persons in 1952 to 3,522 in January 1970 (70% of Bavarian Jewry). In 1966 a Jewish elementary school was opened, the second in Germany, but the postwar community was repeatedly troubled by acts of desecration and vandalism (against synagogue and cemetery). In March 1970 the Jewish home for the aged was burned down and seven people lost their lives.

During the Olympic games, which took place in Munich in 1972, Palestinian terrorists took eleven Israeli sportsmen as hostages. All of them died.

The Jewish community numbered 4,050 in 1989, 5,000 in 1995, and 9,097 in 2004, making it the second largest Jewish community in Germany. The increase is explained by the immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union.

Uncertain Future, Undisputable (and Blissful) Ignorance

Jews in Germany past their peak [1]

I read with wry amusement the following post (see below in italics). In my personal experience, Jewish communities and Jewish associations in Germany - and specifically in Bavaria - are utterly, completely and supremely unwelcoming. The truth is that the Moses-Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam has absolutely no estimate whatsoever of how many Jews who are not members of a community live in Germany. So I would be very curious to hear who in Germany has any “expertise” on the question.

A number of years all sound good: The number of Jews increased from 1989 from 28.000 to some 130.000, what is less than a quarter of the number of Jews living in Germany in 1933, when Hitler rose to power. Several Jewish Communities all over Germany were reestablished, some of them even occupied Rabbis, the first time for 60 years and … worldwide headlines announced a kind of Jewish Renewal in Germany. Only some years ago German newspapers relished that the number of Jewish immigrants from Russia to Germany exceeded the one to Israel. But this was just a snap-shot …

Julius Schoeps, historian and head of the Moses-Mendelssohn Center in Potsdam in view of declining figures of member in Jewish Communities in Berlin as well as Brandenburg suggested to pool them together in order to keep the Jewish Communities “alive”. In Berlin for instance last year there was a decrease of 121 people. 139 arrivals (immigrants, removals and births) contrasted 260 leavings (deaths, removals). The decrease is an underestimated trend for some years. In 2003 the Jewish Community in the German Capital had more than 13.000 members, now at the end of 2008 the figure shrank to mere 10.794 (that is a downturn of 17 % in 5 years). Smaller communities of course are affected by this trend more badly, the more so because there was a trend in recent years that Communities like Berlin advanced there growth by people moving in from surrounding localities.

The situation in Berlin and Brandenburg is representative for the situation of the development in whole Germany. The figure of immigrants decreased to less than one thousand a year – it was at an annual average of 10.000 a couple of years ago. Since a vast majority of the immigrants from former Soviet Union were elderly people, figure of deaths is exceeding nationwide. Especially in smaller communities there are few births, circumcisions or bar mitzvahs.

As few experts predicted the figures of Jewish growth in Germany had reached the point of culmination in 2004/5 and are decreasing since. The high rate of inter-marriages, the increasing leaning towards splitting up into sectarian “liberal” or “reform” communities as well as the current age distribution illustrate that the often acclaimed “normalization” of Jewish life in Germany merely was a kind of flash in the pan. You don’t need to be a prophet to predict that the speed of the diminishment will increase. Maybe as early as 2025 the figures of Jews in Augsburg, Bavaria and Germany again will reach the level of 1990.

The Rintfleisch Pogrom of 1298

Rintfleisch Pogrom (1,2,3,4,5)

The Rintfleisch pogrom was a pogrom against Jews of southern Germany in April-September 1298, during the civil war between Adolph of Nassau and Albert I of Nassau.

The Jews of the Franconian town of Röttingen were charged with profanation of the Host, a medieval superstition that maintained that Jews defiled the communion wafer with blood.

Rintfleisch, whom the sources refer to either as an impoverished knight or a butcher (the name Rindfleisch means beef meat in German), believed to have received a mandate from heaven to avenge the sacrilege and exterminate the Jews.

Under his leadership, an armed band fell upon the Jews of Röttingen, who were massacred and burned down to the last one. After this, he and his mob went from town to town and killed all Jews that fell under their control, destroying the Jewish communities at Rothenburg-on-Tauber, Nördlingen and Bamberg. The great community of Würzburg was entirely annihilated. The Jews of Nuremberg sought refuge in the fortress but were overpowered and butchered.

The persecutions spread from Franconia to Bavaria, and within six months 146 Jewish communities were attacked and often destroyed. In Bavaria, only the congregations of Ratisbon and Augsburg escaped the slaughter, owing to the protection of the magistrates of the city.

The end of the civil war, following the death of Adolph of Nassau, terminated these persecutions. King Albert I finally had Rintfleisch arrested and hanged.

We may say in modern terms that - apart from the excesses of the Crusaders - it was the first case of Jewish “genocide” in Christian Europe. For the first time all the Jews of the country were held responsible for a crime imputed to one or at most several Jews.

The Lamfroms from Augsburg, Bavaria founders of Columbia Sportswear

The Lamfroms from Augsburg, Bavaria [1,2,3,4]

Gertrude Lamfrom was born in Augsburg, in southern Germany some 40 miles from Munich, in 1924. She was the middle sister of three, and her father Paul owned the largest shirt, sock, and underwear factory in the country. Her family lived the Bavarian good life, complete with maids.

It was 1937 when Paul Lamfrom decided to flee with his family from the Nazi regime in Germany to America. He left behind a successful clothing factory and nearly all his money and possessions, but sought safety for himself and his family.

The Lamfrom family was Jewish, and by the mid-1930s it was clear that the wind had begun to blow very chillingly the wrong way. As was often the case in her father’s generation, the eldest son was shipped off to make his way in the New World, and several years earlier her uncle had sailed away to a faraway place called Portland, Oregon. In 1935, Gert’s grandmother traveled to America to visit her son, and before long Gert’s father received a cable from her: “Please dissolve my household. I am not coming back.”

Events in Nazi Germany soon went from very bad to even worse, and in 1937 Gert’s father decided to emigrate to America. His daughter Gertrude wouldn’t return to her homeland for sixty years.

“We were fortunate to be able to get out,” she says now. “We had to leave all our money behind. But we were allowed to bring goods with us, so my parents took my sisters and me to a shoe store and bought each of us 20 pairs of shoes, in different sizes! And they made us clothes and bought a dowry for each of us. Packed everything in two big containers that looked like the back ends of trucks. I wasn’t scared about leaving. I’ve always been one of those people who never live in the past.”

The family sailed first-class from Le Havre in Normandy to New York, then through the Panama Canal and on to Portland. They arrived in August, and immediately the three Lamfrom girls stood out from the Portland crowd.

“Oh, we were quite unusual,” says Gert. “My sisters and I had long braids and we looked very different. It became the thing to do for people to invite us over to their homes: ‘Get those little undernourished German girls over and feed them!’”

Gert spoke no English, so, at 13 years old, she was placed in 1st grade. Two weeks later, she was moved up to 7th grade.

“I must have said ‘Hello’ or something, so they figured I suddenly spoke the language,” she says, “but my complete vocabulary was ‘One a-penny, two a-penny, hot cross buns’! I remember one day the class was learning about Germany, so I had to talk about it. Everyone listened for the whole hour, and later they told me no one had understood a single word!”

"My father decided that our family also had to make a new beginning; we were in a new country and needed to learn a new language. From that moment on no more German was spoken in our house."

Her father borrowed money and bought a small hat manufacturer, the Rosenfeld Hat Company. Having just fled the Nazis, and not entirely convinced that anti-Semitism was nonexistent in his new home, Gert’s father began looking for a new company name. “I won’t deny that I’m Jewish,” he told the family, “but I don’t have to put it on the label.”

He settled on Columbia Hat Company, named after the Columbia River, which forms most of the border between the states of Oregon and Washington.

After graduating from high school, Gert broke form when she took off by herself for the University of Arizona in Tucson. In 1946 she received her sociology degree.

Her family had never been overly Orthodox, so there was nothing to prevent them from embracing the staunchly Catholic Neal Boyle. “I fell in love with a guy who happened to be Catholic, who cares?” Gert says. “It doesn’t really make any difference, and it didn’t bother my family one bit.” In 1948 she married Neal Boyle, who went to work for his father-in-law in the business.

The business grew slowly but steadily. So that the firm could enter other market segments, the name was changed to Columbia Sportswear Company in 1960.

When Paul Lamfrom suddenly died of a heart attack four years later, Neal Boyle took over the helm.

In 1970, Neal Boyle died following a heart attack. Gert and son Tim Boyle, then a University of Oregon senior, took over the operations of Columbia, rescuing it from near bankruptcy.

Columbia Sportswear distributes its products in more than 72 countries and 13,000 retailers. Its flagship store is located in downtown Portland, Oregon.

Lazarus Straus and Macy’s

Lazarus Straus and Macy’s [1,2,3]

Lazarus Straus was born in Otterberg, Bavaria, in 1809. His grand-father, who bore the same name, was one of the most prominent Jews on his day in the Rhenish Bavaria. When in 1806 Napoleon conceived the idea of according the Jews emancipation in the territory of which he has assumed control, he appointed Mr. Straus’s grandfather, who was known as Reb Lazar, a member of the Sanhedrin, or council, which was entrusted with the preparation of a plan for emancipation.

Mr. Straus’s father was identified with large farming interests, and the son also devoted himself to this vocation during his early manhood. He was eminently successful and accumulated a comfortable competence. His leisure time was devoted to study, and more especially to the acquisition of Hebrew learning and knowledge of the Jewish literature.

When the revolution of 1848 stirred Germany, Lazarus Straus championed at once the cause of liberty and emancipation. While not actively engaged, he did his utmost to raise recruits and gave largely of his means to aid the cause. Notwithstanding his ardent devotion to the ends for which the revolutionists fought, Mr. Straus was not exiled with the other prominent leaders. He remained at his home for the next five years, but then he became dissatisfied with the existing order of things and resolved to emigrate to the USA.

He landed in 1853 and proceeded to Talbotton, Ga., where he started a general merchandise business. There he remained until the first year of the war, when he removed to Columbus, Ga. The close of the war found him considerably poorer, and the general depression which followed induced him to come East and try his fortune anew. He had made up his mind to move to Philadelphia, but his son Isidor prevailed upon him to come to New York instead.

Mr. Straus arrived in New York in 1865 and he established with his son Isidor the firm L. Straus & Son. The business prospered from the start and soon the other sons were drawn into it, the firm eventually becoming L. Straus & Sons, and at the same time one of the most extensive importing houses of glassware and crockery in the country.

When R. H. Macy, the head of the firm of R. H. Macy & Co. died in 1874, L. Straus & Sons acquired an interest in that concern. In 1893, R. H. Macy & Co. was acquired by Isidor Straus and his brother Nathan Straus. In 1902, the flagship store moved uptown to Herald Square at 34th Street and Broadway.

Gimbels and Saks Fifth Avenue

Gimbels, Wikipedia [1,2]

Gimbels was an iconic major American department store corporation from 1887 through the late 20th century.

Gimbels was founded by a young German Jewish immigrant, Adam Gimbel (1817–1896). Gimbel arrived as a penniless young immigrant from Bavaria in 1835, settled in New Orleans and earned a living as a travelling peddler. He opened his first store in Vincennes, Indiana, in 1842.

After a brief stay in Danville, Illinois, Gimbel relocated in 1887 to the then boom-town of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The new store was an immense success, quickly becoming the leading department store in Milwaukee.

In 1894 Adam Gimbel acquired the Granville Haines store in Philadelphia, and in 1910 opened another branch in New York City. With its arrival in New York, Gimbels prospered, and soon became the primary rival to the leading Herald Square retailer, Macy's.

In 1922 the chain went public, offering shares on the New York Stock Exchange, though the family retained a controlling interest. This provided the capital for expansion, starting with the 1923 purchase of across-the-street rival, Saks & Co., which operated under the name "Saks Thirty-Fourth Street". With ownership of Saks came a new, about-to-open uptown branch, Saks Fifth Avenue.

In 1925 Gimbels entered the Pittsburgh market with its purchase of Kaufmann & Baer's. Although this expansion spurred talk of the stores becoming a nation-wide chain, such hopes were ended by the Great Depression. The more-upscale and enormously profitable Saks Fifth Avenue stores did continue to expand in the 1930s, opening branches in Chicago, Boston and San Francisco.

At one point, Gimbel Brothers Inc. was the largest department store in the world. By 1930 Gimbels had branched to seven flagship stores throughout the country and had net sales of $123 million. By the time of World War II, profits had exploded to a net worth of $500 million, or over $1 billion in today's money. By 1965, Gimbel Brothers Inc. consisted of 53 stores throughout the country, which included 22 Gimbels, 27 Saks Fifth Avenue stores, and four Saks 34th St.

Isaias W. Hellman, founding father of the University of Southern California

"Towers of Gold" by Frances Dinkelspiel, St. Martin's Press; 376 pages

Abby Pollak, San Francisco Chronicle [1, 2]

As the United States caroms between eleventh-hour bailout plans, we would do well to remember the words of Isaias Hellman (1842-1919), the remarkable financier and builder who guided the transformation of almost every fledgling California industry - from banking to transportation, oil to utilities, newspapers and education to land development and wine - into a social and economic powerhouse. As it happens, he was also a model of fiscal sobriety.

"I am not a speculator," he once told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. "I am strictly an investor, and I have all my life paid for things as I go along. I never borrow money. It is against my principles."

Frances Dinkelspiel's carefully researched and superbly written memoir of her virtually forgotten great-great-grandfather begins with a familiar portrait: the Jewish teenager from Bavaria who arrives in Los Angeles in 1859 and goes to work in his cousin's dry-goods store on Bell's Row, a narrow street of small Jewish shopkeepers and blacksmiths. At the time, L.A. was a lawless frontier pueblo with a population of 4,000, an isolated mudflat of one-story adobe buildings with no telegraph, trains or trolleys, no roads or sewers or garbage collection. In transition from Mexican to American rule, it was largely populated by illiterate hardscrabble farmers, gamblers, prostitutes and violent criminals (the homicide rate was 20 to 30 per month).

An almost biblical onslaught of plagues followed Hellman's arrival: the flood of 1861, which ripped out thousands of grapevines by the roots and literally dissolved the town, leaving behind the rotting carcasses of tens of thousands of sheep and cattle, and a mountain of wreckage buried in mud; a smallpox epidemic; and two years of relentless sun and hot desert winds carrying swarms of grasshoppers that devastated pasturelands and livestock, bankrupting the remaining Californios.

Young Isaias Hellman worked hard, learned fast, and in the spring of 1865, at the age of 22, opened his first store, an elegant oasis that aimed to shelter his customers from the chaos outside. He put in gas-lit chandeliers, burnished wooden counters and scales to measure the prevailing currency of gold dust and nuggets. In the rear of the store, he installed his piece de resistance, a Tilden & McFarland safe, which not only radiated protection and security but also allowed him to offer his customers temporary free storage for their gold.

In no time at all, there was $200,000 in his safe. Nervous about making mistakes, but fiercely ethical and armed with an uncanny instinct for a good business deal, Isaias put this capital to good use by establishing credit for deposited amounts and letting customers draw on it when they liked. No longer obliged to borrow at exorbitant rates from private businessmen in San Francisco, farmers and merchants who wanted to expand happily entrusted him with their assets. At age 28, Hellman thus became Los Angeles' first legitimate banker.

No single individual could have accomplished this without partners, and Dinkelspiel paints fascinating portraits of the men with whom Isaias forged alliances, men who invested in one another's railroads, factories, bond deals and financial institutions. This powerful network of friends and relatives in German Jewish circles on both coasts (the "Reckendorf Aristocracy" in California, "Our Crowd" in New York), featured names like Lehman, Strauss, Levi, Haas, Fleishhacker, Zellerbach, Brandenstein, Seligman, Loeb, Dinkelspiel and Schiff.

Moreover, given the historically widespread Jewish anxiety about the dangers of high-profile success - Isaias was the victim of seemingly inexhaustible accusations that he was more Shylock than savior and that in order to destroy his competition he personally caused the gold shortage that resulted in the recessions of 1875 and 1893 - he forged extraordinarily propitious partnerships with local Yankee landed gentry: among them John Downey, the charismatic former governor of California; Harrison Gray Otis; Henry Huntington; William Mulholland; and Phoebe Hearst.

Through flood, fire and the devastating earthquake of 1906, through bank runs, assassination attempts and family betrayals, blackmail and embezzlement scandals, graft and corruption trials, Isaias emerged stronger, more creative and more resolute than ever. Unerringly prescient, he invested heavily in the Southern Pacific Railroad, which connected Los Angeles not only to San Francisco but also to the rest of the country. He bought vast amounts of land from old ranchos and by planting wheat, corn, alfalfa, pecan and orange trees, transformed them into agricultural giants. When his financial activity, especially the lucrative business of selling investment bonds, outran the capability of his own Farmers & Merchants Bank, Isaias took over the Nevada Bank, one of the richest in the country; its merger with Wells Fargo in 1904 made it one of the West's largest financial institutions.

Determined to underwrite businesses that would develop California, he bankrolled Doheney and Canfield, two young oilmen who uncovered rich oil fields under L.A.'s ubiquitous brea pits; their company became today's Unocal. In 1895, he formed a syndicate with Henry Huntington, the visionary railroad man who built the Pacific Electric Railroad with its bright red trolley cars and interurban web of track that crisscrossed the city, extending as far as Pasadena, Long Beach, Monrovia, Whittier, Glendale, Newport and San Pedro. He sold bond issues for Pacific Light and Power and for San Gabriel Electric, for Hetch Hetchy and for the California Wine Association, composed even then of more than 50 wineries, including Cucamonga, Stag's Leap and Greystone Cellars.

In 1862, he founded Los Angeles' first synagogue, which became the Wilshire Boulevard Reform Temple. He also helped start the University of Southern California, and for many years served as a regent of the University of California. By 1911, when women got the right to vote, Hellman had become an almost mythical figure, an international symbol of the breathtaking opportunities in the American West.