The year 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of Jewish Heritage Europe, and we are celebrating it throughout the year with special content. The theme of JHE’s 10th birthday celebrations is the “Anniversary of Anniversaries” — that is, using JHE’s own anniversary to feature other significant or symbolic anniversaries related to Jewish heritage that also take place this year.
In this post, we take note of events marking the 100th anniversary of the Etz Chaim orthodox synagogue in Leipzig, Germany, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht.
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A commemorative week September 4-11 will mark the 100th anniversary of the inauguration of the orthodox Etz Chaim synagogue in Leipzig, described as the largest orthodox synagogue in Saxony, seating 1,200 people. The synagogue stood for only 16 years — the Nazis destroyed it on the so-called Reichspogrom nacht — Kristallnacht — November 9-10, 1938.
Construction was funded by the tobacco merchant Chaim Eitingon,via his Talmud Torah Association, and the synagogue was designed by the local architect Gustav Pflaume. It was built on the site of a gymnasium and former exhibition hall for bicycles.
Pflaume’s architectural plans — which can be seen on the web site of the Center for Jewish Art — show the synagogue with a simple facade with a peaked roof and three arched entrances. Inside, there was a large central sanctuary under the vaulted ceiling, whose downstairs seating, with a central bimah facing the ark, was surrounded on three sides by an upper floor women’s gallery.
The synagogue served a congregation mainly composed of orthodox Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, who came to Leipzig in the late 19th century fleeing pogroms.
Leipzig’s main synagogue was a grand, ornate building erected in 1854-55. It served the Reform congregation — and it, too, was destroyed on Kristallnacht. A powerful memorial consisting of 140 empty chairs has long stood on its footprint, but no major memorial was erected at the site of the Ez Chaim synagogue — it is now a parking lot.
The commemorative week is part of a project by several NGOs and associations, in cooperation with eh Jewish community, to foster memory of the Ez Chaim synagogue and its congregation. Suggestions and proposals will be presented during the week’s events.
“In contrast to the dignified memorial on the site of the former Liberal Congregational Great Synagogue, the site of the former Ez Chaim Great Orthodox Synagogue is a lost site with no evidence of the synagogue,” states the web site of the Notenspur Leipzig association, which is coordinating the events.
In cooperation with the Bürgerverein Kolonnadenviertel and the Henriette Goldschmidt School, the lost place is to be regained as a place of remembrance through the project. We will work intensively with the trainee educators of the Henriette Goldschmidt School in order to make the former location of the Ez Chaim Synagogue worthy. In workshops, we develop a concept with the trainees and plan which publicity campaigns we can carry out within this framework. This concept will be created in cooperation and in consultation with the citizens’ association Kolonnadenviertel (“Die Kolle”) and will be implemented.
The Commemorative Week includes lectures, concerts, open-air video projections, guided tours, and other events. Some of the concerts feature recordings of music and performances by cantors who served the synagogue.
Click to see the architectural plans, on the Center for Jewish Art web site
Click here to see the program of the Commemorative Week events.