Author: Ann Laemmlen Lewis

Once each year, the German class treats Sis Enger to a nice dinner out as a thank you for all she does for us.  We all met at the Zoll Haus, and we enjoyed a really good German meal and really delightful company.  We love Sis Enger!

A few of us took an outing today to Zophia’s Polish Pottery shop in Rodenbach, about 1.5 hours from Frankfurt.  This is a favorite shopping destination for the missionaries.  It was fun to go take a look and pick out a few things for Claire’s birthday next month.

The owner tells us she will only be receiving one more shipment sometime in the next month or two, then when everything is sold, she’s closing the shop and retiring from this business.  She’s been at it since 1989.

The pottery was beautiful.

As it got dark, we decided to go back to the Dom to end our day there.  As we approached, the 5:45 bells started peeling.  It was glorious!

Once inside the cathedral, we could see some big event was anticipated.  The chapel was fill with people and cameramen were at the back, ready to record.  After a few minutes, a processional sounded from the organ pipes above, and we stepped to the side as a long line of important religious leaders started filing into the cathedral.  They were coming from a peacekeeping meeting held in another hall nearby.

We stood by, quietly watching.

I later found this report in the local news:

CATHEDRAL TALK ON KARLSAMT
Saturday, January 27, 24, 4:30 p.m
High-ranking guests, representatives of the knightly orders in impressive robes and a lot of tradition: the Karlsamt, which is celebrated every year at the end of January in Frankfurt’s St. Bartholomew Cathedral, is a popular spectacle. The traditional pontifical mass is celebrated in memory of Emperor Charlemagne, who is not only the founding father of Europe, but also the patron of the city and the imperial cathedral. In 2024 it will take place on Saturday, January 27th, 6 p.m., the guest celebrant is Vincenzo Viva, Bishop of Albano / Italy. Registration or seat reservation is not necessary.

The Karlsamt is a pontifical mass held in Frankfurt am Main , which is celebrated annually in honor of Charlemagne around his death and memorial day , January 28th.

In the Frankfurt Imperial Cathedral , once the coronation church of German emperors , the Charlemagne celebration since 1332 takes place on the last Saturday in January to commemorate the anniversary of Charlemagne’s death (assassinated in 1165).

We didn’t stay for the service, but we enjoyed hearing the Latin music as we left.  I felt grateful to see so many good men and women gathering to talk about and pray for peace in Europe.  There are so many good people who turn to God.

John in his pastry glory, for one last Backerei as we headed to the U-Bahn to come home!

After visiting the 2 Jewish Museums, our time had run out for any other museums, so we went into town, to the Zeil, or the main shopping boulevard to have a look around.  Along the way we saw more demonstrators, we found a few pastry shops, and we enjoyed a fun farmer’s market.

There is a good deal of graffiti in Germany, which always saddens me. In every other way, Germany is clean, neat and tidy.

Lots of bikers were out today.

The Zeil:

A touch of Spring:

John has a goal to eat a pastry in every place we go.  He’s off to a good start!

At the Judengasse Museum, we learned that on Kristallnacht, the Nazis destroyed the two synagogues in Frankfurt.

From Wikipedia:

Beginning on November 9, the SA and Hitler Youth shattered the windows of about 7,500 Jewish stores and businesses, hence the name Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), and looted their goods.  Jewish homes were ransacked all throughout Germany. Although violence against Jews had not been explicitly condoned by the authorities, there were cases of Jews being beaten or assaulted. Following the violence, police departments recorded a large number of suicides and rapes.

The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland.  Over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms, many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores were damaged, and in many cases destroyed. More than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps; primarily Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.

The synagogues, some centuries old, were also victims of considerable violence and vandalism, with the tactics the Stormtroopers practiced on these and other sacred sites described as “approaching the ghoulish” by the United States Consul in Leipzig. Tombstones were uprooted and graves violated. Fires were lit, and prayer books, scrolls, artwork and philosophy texts were thrown upon them, and precious buildings were either burned or smashed until unrecognizable. Eric Lucas recalls the destruction of the synagogue that a tiny Jewish community had constructed in a small village only twelve years earlier:

It did not take long before the first heavy grey stones came tumbling down, and the children of the village amused themselves as they flung stones into the many colored windows. When the first rays of a cold and pale November sun penetrated the heavy dark clouds, the little synagogue was but a heap of stone, broken glass and smashed-up woodwork.

The Daily Telegraph correspondent, Hugh Greene, wrote of events in Berlin:

Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the ‘fun’.

Not only did they destroy these places of worship, the Jewish community was forced to pay for the removal of the rubble.  The stones that were salvaged were used to build the walls around the main city cemetery that is just across the street from where we live.

This is our favorite place to go walking.  I will never again look at these stone walls in the same way.  They would speak to us if they could.  We must never ever forget the story they would tell.

Next we walked to the other Jewish Museum, called the Judengasse Museum.  Both museums work together to tell the story of the Jewish people in Frankfurt.

Here is some information I found fascinating, gathered from a few sites, including Wikipedia:

The Frankfurter Judengasse (lit. ‘Jews’ Lane’) was the Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt and one of the earliest ghettos in Germany. It existed from 1462 until 1811 and was home to Germany’s largest Jewish community in early modern times.

At the end of the 19th century, most of the buildings in the Judengasse were demolished. The area suffered major destruction during World War II and reconstruction left no visible signs of the ghetto in today’s townscape of Frankfurt.

Post-war usage of the area included a car park, a petrol station and a wholesale flower market. The decision to build an administrative complex triggered a public discussion as to what should be done with the archaeological remains uncovered during the excavation in 1977. The foundations of 19 buildings were found and five of these can be seen at the “Museum Judengasse” which was incorporated into the new building.

The ghetto was located outside the city walls east of the medieval city wall (Staufenmauer) and formed a slight curve from today’s Konstablerwache to Börneplatz, near the river Main. The street was about 330 meters long, three to four meters wide, and had three town gates. The gates were locked at night as well as on Sundays and Christian holidays. Due to the narrow street and the limited access, the Judengasse was destroyed three times by fire in the 18th century alone, in 1711, 1721 and 1796.

Initially, some 15 families with about 110 members lived in Frankfurt’s Judengasse when they were forcibly removed from the city and relocated to the ghetto by decree of Frederick III in 1462. By the 16th century, the number of inhabitants rose to over 3,000, living in 195 houses. The ghetto had one of the highest population densities in Europe. Contemporary documents described it as narrow, oppressive and dirty.

As we approached this Judengasse Museum, we heard demonstrations in the street coming toward us. There were police cars driving before those marching with Palestinian flags. They were yelling and shouting and the people at the museum were nervous and hurried our group in (I was out in the street taking pics). They were very cautious and security was high.
We soon forgot all of that as we immersed ourselves in the museum displays and the archaeological site. We were able to walk down into the foundations and rooms of 3 of the homes that were in the ghetto. The homes were long and narrow, about 5 meters wide. Most were 4-5 stories tall, sandwiched together tight, squished, compact.

Museum Judengasse
In 1987, during construction work on an administration building on Börneplatz , the foundations of 19 houses on Judengasse were discovered. It was the largest archaeological find to date of a Jewish settlement from the early modern period in Europe. The find sparked a public conflict of nationwide importance over the question of how to deal with these evidence of a repressed Jewish history. While the client, the city of Frankfurt, only wanted to document the remains and remove them for the new building, numerous people protested against the removal as “disposal of history”. At the end of the so-called Börneplatz conflict , which was also an epochal conflict regarding German-Jewish relations, there was a compromise: five of the house foundations discovered were removed and rebuilt in the basement of the administration building on the original site.

Frankfurt’s Judengasse was the first Jewish ghetto in Europe. It was built in 1460 on the old Staufer city wall; Two years later, the Jewish residents of Frankfurt, who previously lived in the immediate vicinity of the cathedral , were forced to relocate . Over the centuries, Judengasse developed into a cultural center that was widely known for its scholarship and was visited by students from far away. Its population grew to over 3,000 people in the 17th century until the order for the Jewish population to settle in Judengasse was lifted after the end of the Napoleonic Wars . The ghetto was demolished in the 1870s; However , the immediately adjacent old Jewish cemetery remained intact, even if no more burials were carried out on site at that time. Immediately next to the cemetery and at the southern end of the former Judengasse, the Börneplatz Synagogue was built in 1881/82 and was destroyed during the November pogrom. In 1942, the National Socialist city administration issued an order to demolish the old Jewish cemetery, but this was not fully implemented.

The Judengasse Museum was opened in 1992 as a branch of the Jewish Museum. It presents the history and culture of Frankfurt’s Jews from the Middle Ages to Emancipation in the foundations of 5 houses on Judengasse. In March 2016 the house was reopened with a newly designed exhibition. It borders the Neuer Börneplatz Memorial , which commemorates the Frankfurt Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the old Battonnstrasse Jewish Cemetery, which is included in the audio tour.

The ghetto burned many times through the centuries, and then was completely leveled during WWII.  There were nice displays with audio and also a film of the history of the area. Fascinating. I really enjoyed it. We 8 were scattered throughout the museum, each going where we wanted to until the 5:00 closing.

Below you can see where the Judengasse was situated under what is now current-day Frankfurt.

In 1943 the cemetery (to the right above) was destroyed and around 4000 of more than 6000 gravestones were smashed to pieces.

In November 1938, more than 1400 synagogues and assembly rooms across Germany were destroyed, including the two in Frankfurt.

After the synagogues were destroyed, the Jews were forced to pay for the removal of the rubble.  I was fascinated to learn that the stones that were still useable were taken to build the walls of the main city cemetery across the street from where we live.  We see those stones every day.  I’ll write more about that in my next post.

The excavations in the museum were fascinating.  It gave us a feel for the long narrow homes that once stood here.

Here’s a map of Frankfurt in 1682.  The Jewish ghetto was located outside the city walls.

We will need to return on a day when the cemetery is open (not Saturdays).  Visits like these are always sobering.  There has been a great deal of unrest in Germany this last week, demonstrations involving tens of thousands of people standing up against an extreme right-wing political party who wants to “cleanse” Germany of immigrants and non-German ethnicities.  Many remember what happened here not so many years ago, and echo the desire that “nie immer ist jetzt” (never again is now).