The project to restore the “Old Synagogue” in Bad Laasphe, Germany and create there a place of remembrance and encounter will be moving forward thanks to a recent grant from the Federal Government of just over €378,000.
The grant of €378,419 was announced in December, a few days before Hanukkah. It was part of €2.65 million in federal funding will for projects in the Siegen-Wittgenstein district. It adds to promised funding of up to EUR 830,000 from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
A local volunteer association, the Bad Laaspher Circle of Friends for Christian-Jewish Cooperation (CJZ), purchased the synagogue in January 2019 with the object of making it a cultural center with events such as lectures, readings, concerts, exhibitions, as well as a permanent exhibit on local Jewish history and the local families killed by the Nazis.
“The Old Synagogue is to become a place of remembrance for Jewish families,” CJZ’s chair, Rainer Becker, told JHE in a letter.
Here, in a permanent exhibition, the victims of the Nazi dictatorship from our home region of Wittgenstein are to get a face again, after they had been degraded to numbers in the concentration camps. As a place of learning, the Old Synagogue enables all visitors to learn where intolerance, exclusion and xenophobia can lead using the example of the fates of our region.
Watch a video about the project. It’s in German, but you can activate translation of the subtitles.:
The synagogue dates from the mid-18th century and functioned until Kristallnacht in November 1938. Jews — who had made up around seven percent of the local population in the mid-19th century — had already begun to leave to escape Nazi persecution after Hitler took power in 1933. Around 70 local Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, Becker said, and there is no Jewish community in the town today. After World War II the synagogue was used as a locksmith’s shop.
“I have been supporting the planning of the Bad Laaspher Circle of Friends for Christian-Jewish Cooperation for the memorial in the Old Synagogue for a long time and I am committed to its implementation in many places in Berlin,” Bad Laasphe Bundestag member Licina-Bode said in a news release December 14 announcing the grant. “I hope that this will not only provide a valuable historical place of learning, but also an upgrading of the historic old town in Bad Laasphe.”
Becker told JHE that the estimated budget for the Old Synagogue project was €1.5 million, so even with the new grant there is a shortfall.
Potential donors can contact him at:
Rainer Becker, Chairman: Schlossstraße 18a, 57334 Bad Laasphe
Email: [email protected] Phone: 0049-2752-9314
Or make a direct donation to these accounts:
IBAN: DE42 4605 3480 0000 2002 87 BIC: WELADED1BEB Sparkasse Wittgenstein
IBAN: DE16 5139 0000 0050 2129 04 BIC: VBMHDE5F Volksbank Mittelhessen