Leipzig’s Jewish community rises from the ashes

Kuf Kaufmann could not have put it better. “The existence of a Jewish community in Leipzig represents a victory over Hitler,” he said, sitting at at a table at the Auerbachs Keller, a restaurant immortalized by Germany’s greatest man of letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his play, Faust.

Kaufmann, who was born and bred in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to eastern Germany 20 years ago, should know.

When he arrived in Leipzig, the biggest city in the federal state of Saxony, it was virtually bereft of Jews.

Some 13,000 Jews lived here in the mid-1920s, contributing mightily to Leipzig’s economy and cultural life. But by 1990, the year in which Germany was unified after more than four decades of division, the Jewish population of Leipzig had dwindled to about 35 mostly elderly people, some of them half-Jewish, who were largely disconnected from all things Jewish, said Kaufmann, who has headed the community since 2001.

The historic Jewish presence in Leipzig, whose current population is around 500,000, was shattered by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.  The Nazis not only drove out and murdered Leipzig’s Jewish inhabitants, they destroyed all but one of its 17 synagogues

But with the arrival of Russian Jews like Kaufmann, a new, more hopeful chapter in Leipzig’s checkered Jewish history was launched. The community has grown modestly but steadily, and today there are about 1,300 registered Jews in Leipzig.  

According to Kaufmann – a 62-year-old cartoonist and comedian originally from St. Petersburg – Leipzig had 500 Jews in 1995 and 1,000 in 2000.

Practically all of them are Soviet Jews.

Since then, growth has slowed, due to Leipzig’s fairly high unemployment rate, which stands at 15 per cent, and to Germany’s decision to tighten immigration regulations.

In actual fact, there are roughly 4,000 Jews here, half of whom have no official ties with the community, said Kaufmann, who emigrated from the Soviet Union after his daughter was assaulted in an anti-Semitic attack.

When he was asked how many of the unaffiliated Jews are halachically Jewish, he grew testy, pounding his hand on the table. “We’re all Jewish,” said Kaufmann, an otherwise cheerful person.

He acknowledged that the dismal economic situation has prompted younger Jews to leave Leipzig for supposedly greener pastures in Germany. His own family has been affected by this development: Kaufmann’s 38-year-old son lives and works in Germany’s capital, Berlin.

Nonetheless, he is bullish, saying that the community is continuing to build a solid infrastructure for the future.

This past May, a cultural centre, known as Ariowitsch House, was opened in a ceremony attended by Jewish community members and city dignitaries. Ariowitsch House was  a Jewish seniors home in the early 1930s. By 1942, all its residents had been deported. (The last transport of Jews bound for Theresienstadt left Leipzig in Feb. 14, 1945, three months before Nazi Germany’s surrender). During the post-war Communist period, the building was used as a municipal seniors home.

Apart from its cultural centre, the community is served by a Torah centre, a kindergarten and a synagogue, the Brody or Broder shul, the only one in the city to survive Kristallnacht in November 1938.

Services are conducted by an itinerant rabbi who also attends to the religious needs of Jews in Dresden and Chemnitz (formerly Karl Marx Stadt) and by Rabbi Dovid Chandalov, a young Belarus-born rabbi who heads the Torah centre and serves as the representative of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation in Saxony.

On a recent evening, Rabbi Chandalov – a 29-year-old graduate of Ner Israel Yeshiva in Baltimore – led services at the Brody shul, which was consecrated in 1904 and is in the Mitte district, near the zoological garden and the massive railway station.

The 15 congregants were Russian, and all but four were under the age of 30. By the rabbi’s estimate, most Russian Jewish immigrants here are over 40 and dependent on welfare payments. They are, however, glad to be in Germany. “People just want to leave Russia,” he said. “It’s a difficult place. They don’t care where in Germany they end up.”

The compact synagogue has a blue linoleum floor and is decorated with stained glass windows. The roof is supported by white columns embossed with gold leaf and blue and maroon flourishes. The high ceiling is adorned with blue squares and gold Stars of David. A curtain separates men from women.

Surprisingly, not a single police officer was on duty outside guarding the synagogue, which is indistinguishable from adjacent buildings. Synagogues everywhere else in Germany are protected day and night. But on the door leading directly into the shul, the phone numbers of the police and fire departments were posted, just in case.

Before the rise of Nazism, the Mitte was  filled with Orthodox shuls, from the Eitz Chaim Synagogue on 8 Otto Shillstrasse and the Beth Yehudah Synagogue on 11 Faberstrasse to the Chevra Mishnayoth Synagogue on 24 Humboldtsrasse and the Boyaner Synagogue on 24 Leibnitzstrasse.  For years, the rabbi of the Brody shul, at 4 Keilstrasse, was Ephraim Carlebach (1879-1936).

The majority of Jews in the Mitte were Polish Jews, and in a prelude to Kristallnacht, they were deported to Poland.

On Kristallnacht, the Brody Synagogue was spared, due to its proximity to Christian-owned buildings. But all the other shuls in the neighbourhood, as well as the Grand Synagogue –  a mid-19th century Reform shul on Gottschedstrasse – were destroyed. On the site today is a memorial stone and 140 empty chairs to signify the Holocaust.

In a sense, Leipzig is a city of Jewish  ghosts.

At 1 Goethestrasse, a plaque affixed to the side of a building informs visitors that it once housed the Bamberger and Hertz department store, a concept pioneered by German Jews. The edifice, now occupied by Citibank, was renovated by the owners, Ludwig and Gustav Bamberger, before the Nazis expropriated it. The Bambergers were killed during the Holocaust.

The 10-storey concrete-coloured Kroch building, the first highrise tower in Leipzig,  is decorated with a striking fresco of medieval figures. The brainchild of the banker Hans Kroch (1887-1970), the mini skyscraper was finished in 1928, during the Weimar Republic period, and was aryanized in 1939. Kroch left Germany after being imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

From 1875 to 1928, Leipzig was a hub of the fur trade, with hundreds of shops located around and along Bruhlstrasse in a series of arcades. Jews were heavily involved in the fur business, but after their departure, Leipzig never regained its prewar eminence in the industry.

Rabbi Chandalov and his wife, an American of Russian descent, live in an old apartment building that the Nazis herded Jews into before they were “resettled” and murdered in Riga, Belzyce, Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.   It is two blocks from the Brody Synagogue, and the rabbi can walk there in a few minutes.

From 1939 onward, the 2,000 Jews still remaining in Leipzig were segregated in 47 such buildings. All were marked with a black Star of David.

Seventy years on, Rabbi Chandalov hopes that Leipzig’s resurrected Jewish community will thrive and prosper.

His success will be a mighty rebuke to Hitler and his followers.