cometoweb

On September 29, 1914, the merchant Abraham Abraham sent a package of food supplies to Jacob Schneller on the Western Front. In the surviving accompanying letter to his Christian friend, Abraham wrote that God may help the „righteous German cause“ to a speedy victory. Abraham’s hopes for a quick end to the war, which was only a few weeks old, were soon dashed. His son Sigmund had also been drafted, like all Lorsch men fit for military service, and was seriously wounded. Three Lorsch Jews fell at the front, three of four brothers from the Guthof family who fought in France. Lorsch Jews were also in action on the Eastern Front. The shoemaker Abraham Lorch from Stiftstraße wrote from the river Memel to Eduard Rohrheimer, who had been wounded and was staying in Lorsch. Some of the Lorsch Jews were taken prisoner, probably longest of all Alfred Lorch, who in 1919 still sent a picture postcard from the English camp Handforth near Manchester to an uncle in Johannesburg. The patriotism shown by the German Jews was poorly rewarded. As the war wore on, anti-Semitism spread, and there was talk of „shirking.“ An investigation by the War Ministry, which was kept secret until after the end of the war, proved the opposite: at over 17%, proportionally more Jews than non-Jews (16%) were called up for military service. According to an endowment by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, all front-line fighters received the Cross of Honor starting in 1934. The Jews among them thought at that time that this subsequent award – even signed by Hitler after Hindenburg’s death – would protect them from the onset of Nazi persecution, which unfortunately turned out to be a fatal misconception. This was also the experience of Leopold Kahn, whose wife had sent his medal to Buchenwald concentration camp in November 1938.

The rural Jews were slow to free themselves from the old occupational restrictions. They remained faithful to the division of labor with their Christian neighbors, which was the trade in agricultural products and livestock, and everything that goes with it: slaughtering, fodder, fertilizer, leather and fur trade. Leather trade became shoe trade. Building materials were among the newer trade products. However, the advertisements were dominated by goods and services of daily use. The flying merchants settled down and soon offered their rich product range in large shop windows.

The Electoral Mainzian Oberamt Starkenburg was an exclave. The nearest Jewish cemetery was in Alsbach, on Hessian-Darmstadt territory. The way across the border cost a duty for the funeral procession and the corpse, and the burial itself was also taxed. For the year 1705 the first Lorsch burial is proven with Simon ben Jehuda, who called himself Simon Lorsch. However, apparently not everyone could afford the prescribed rites. Therefore, in 1739, Jews from Lorsch, Kleinhausen, Bensheim, Biblis, Bürstadt, Bobstadt, Heppenheim and Hambach founded a burial brotherhood, the Chevra Kadisha, a charity association for mutual support, especially for poorer community members. The seat of this brotherhood for the Starkenburg Oberamt was in Lorsch. If a death occurred in a community, a messenger was sent to Lorsch to organize the funeral within the shortest possible time – often the following day. The funeral procession went from Lorsch across the border at the Wattenheim Bridge to Alsbach. At the end, people gathered in the Lorsch synagogue. The Starkenburg Chevra Kadisha was the second oldest association of its kind in the Electorate of Mainz. It was expanded in 1812 to include an association for the endowment of brides. The members met annually in Lorsch for the reckoning and the banquet. For these occasions, they owned a many-piece pewter tableware. The expenses were considerable. As usual, a silver goblet filled with wine then circulated, on which the names of the donors since 1739 were engraved. Moritz Mainzer noted them all down in 1914, otherwise they would have been forgotten, because the goblet was stolen during the November pogrom in 1938 and has been lost ever since. And with it all records of the society.

In the second half of the 19th century the Lorchs took over the predominance among the Lorsch Jewish families from the Mainzers, many of whose descendants emigrated to Mannheim, Frankfurt and to America. Even before the death of Jonas Mainzer (1835 – 1888), Simon Lorch (1842 – 1913) became community head in the 1880s. Simon Lorch had married his niece Mina Wolf, the elder daughter of his sister Theresa. Her husband Gottschall Wolf had died young. Simon took over Wolf’s business house next to the synagogue. The property with the synagogue had been owned by the Jewish community for about 150 years at that time. The prayer room was on the 1st floor, downstairs lived the salaried teachers. In the basement there was a groundwater mikvah. In 1884 the old building was demolished and a new synagogue made of stone was built. The master builder was Franz Anton Klein (1847 – 1894), a teacher of Heinrich Metzendorf. Klein was married to Mathilde Kilian from Lorch. Lorch was responsible for the construction on behalf of the community. Thus, even before the larger communities of Bensheim (1891) and Heppenheim (1901), the town had a representative synagogue made of stone, the style of which seems to have been strongly inspired by the eclectic facade of the New Synagogue in Darmstadt.

Naftali ben Salomo, called Hirz Menz, came to Lorsch at the end of the 17th century, probably from Mainz. With his wife Schönle, from Pfungstadt, he founded a clan of successful merchants and traders in the town. The first five generations made considerable fortunes, much of which was lost in the sixth generation due to the First World War. The National Socialists robbed the rest and some family members of their lives as well. Their story exemplifies the development of successful rural Jewry in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Mainzers owed their rise to three factors. Like many Jews, they were industrious but also strategically working merchants. As soon as the edicts of tolerance issued by Erthal, the Elector of Mainz, made it possible for them to do so from 1784 onward, they acquired houses and fields from their profits. In 1831, a dozen Lorsch farm estates were owned by various family members, some of which they managed themselves (trading in crops, tobacco, and livestock), but also rented out. They took enormous risks. For example, in order to win the bidding for a large business such as supplying the Darmstadt Grand Duke’s army with bread flour – ultimately successfully – Samuel Mainzer put up his own farm tract (Römerstraße 6) and several fields worth over 4,000 gulden as a mortgage in 1845. Although the infant mortality rate of all Mainzer births (1838 – 1875) was higher than the average in the Reich (37 compared to 25%), all 13 children (from two marriages) of Maier Mainzer I from the fourth generation survived. But only for three of them Lorsch still offered opportunities for development: Leopold, Jonas and Nathan. Their siblings sought and found their opportunities elsewhere, in Mainz and in Mannheim, in Alzey, Frankfurt, and in America.

The Church State of Mainz was a fractured territory around monasteries and convents acquired in the medieval period with the centers at Mainz (Lower Archbishopric) and Aschaffenburg (Upper Archbishopric). The communities belonging to the Bergstrasse district formed exclaves in the south of the Lower Archbishopric (Starkenburg Office) with borders to Worms, the Palatinate and the Landgraviate of Hesse. The local parish priests of the chapter were executives of the Church State for the Jewish rural communities that formed here. In the diocese of Mainz, Jewish congregations that held organized services in a synagogue or prayer room had to pay an annual episcopal tax of 3 gulden to the bishop’s see. The so-called Synagogicum was used to support the provincial rabbi, who held a civil servant-like position at the court in Mainz. The local priests collected the money and the Dean deducted it. Since 1736 this was the duty of Georg Adam Castricius from Gernsheim. From the records from the beginning of his tenure, we have the first evidence of the existence of synagogue congregations in the Bergstrasse district chapter. In 1737 Castricius prepared a tabular overview with these seven places: Gernsheim, Biblis, Lorsch, Heppenheim, Viernheim, Bürstadt and Bensheim. Dieburg was added in 1740. In detailed notes he describes the process and thus hands down a valuable contribution to the organization of the Mainz rural Jewry in this period. After Castricius‘ death in 1757, the Synagogicum was still sporadically recorded until 1765, after which there is no more evidence in this protocol book, which was kept until 1821. As early as 1725, the Lorsch priest had noted the collection of the Synagogicum in his church register: „3 fl. from the local Jewish community.“

„Grandfather attended a performance of Lessing’s ‚Nathan the Wise‘ in 1855. This work, in which such comprehensive humanity and religious tolerance are expressed, seemed to have made such a lasting impression on him that he moved from the extreme orthodoxy of his youth to an absolute freedom of religious thought and tolerance.“ So wrote Louise Heidelberg in her biography of her grandfather, the Mannheim and Lorsch entrepreneur Lazarus Morgenthau. Lessing had initially published the play privately in 1779, and a first – non-public – performance took place in Mannheim. The Jewish philosopher and Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn served Lessing as the model for Nathan. In fact, the Enlightenment and state tolerance soon had an effect on rural Jewry as well. Above all, because economic opportunities could be exploited, such as land acquisition and relative freedom of trade. In 1911, Moritz Mainzer explicitly attributed the improvement in the living conditions of his Lorsch ancestors to the reform process begun by Erthal in 1784. However, nothing changed for the Jewish precariat, the many wandering Jews without letters of protection. Where they were tolerated, they depended on the charity of their fellow Jews. During the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation, Jews also fought for their personal freedoms. They were again disappointed by the states of the German Bund. In 1848, their representatives in the Frankfurt National Assembly then vehemently advocated civic equality. Gabriel Riesser, a lawyer and publicist in Hamburg and Frankfurt, and Johann Jacoby, a physician from Königsberg, who told Prussia’s Frederick William IV to his face during an audience in the revolutionary year, became famous: „That is the misfortune of kings, that they do not want to hear the truth.“ But it was not until the Reich Constitution of 1871 that Jews throughout Germany finally gained unrestricted civil rights.

Friedrich Karl Joseph von Erthal was the first German duke to initiate the emancipation of Jews in the German territorial states. Erthal had been Elector of Mainz since 1774 and, as a representative of enlightened absolutism, corrected the line of his reactionary predecessors. Nevertheless, it took until after the death of Maria Theresa (1780), who had still banned Jews from Prague in 1744, for her son, Emperor Joseph II, and with him the archchancellor of the empire, Erthal, to finally dare to extend their reforms to the Jews. In the Electorate of Mainz, Erthal issued three general rescripts of the medieval Jewish order in 1783/84. Printed ordinances and decrees of the Mainz government were transferred to a Kopialbuch in the Lorsch office (since 1782). The decree of February 17, 1784 was of a fundamental nature. Electoral land law now applied to Jews (Jews among themselves had possessed a certain autonomy, with the rabbi as the first instance). Participation of Jews in provincial assemblies (mainly for tax estimation) became obligatory, as did bookkeeping in German, teacher examinations, and German examinations as a prerequisite for the granting of letters of protection. The issuance of death certificates became obligatory. Equality with Christian subjects was achieved in marriage licenses, the free exercise of trade (outside the guilds), but above all in the free choice of schools at all state schools, the unrestricted purchase of land and houses, and thus the freedom of settlement. On September 27, 1784, Erthal had to clarify: „…and order that the Jewish children should in no case pay more in school fees than the Christian children, and that the school teachers should see to it that the Jewish schoolchildren are not treated with indignity, but with equal consideration.“

The collections of Berthold Rosenthal are a stroke of luck. After the Mannheim teacher was forced into retirement by the Nazis in 1933, he searched the municipal archives in Baden and Hesse for records of rural Jewry. As if he suspected that much would be lost, he noted down thousands of genealogical data in school notebooks, even after 1938 and a stay in a concentration camp in Dachau. The memorbuch, which he found in the Lorsch synagogue, was also unique for Rosenthal. Similar to a monastic necrology, the Jewish Memorbuch is a register of the dead commemorating the deceased on anniversaries. It is kept under the almemor (lectern) of the synagogue. Hence its name. Rosenthal noted the data of 19 persons from the years 1758 to 1850. Since there were several more deaths in the community during this period, either only certain persons were recorded, or the genealogist noted a selection. For two persons their effected donations are recorded. One tragic incident, in which an entire family was wiped out in 1831, was recorded by Rosenthal in the original Hebrew of the preacher of the time. Samuel Mainzer, his wife Chawa and their daughter Esther had been murdered by their Christian neighbor and tenant. The murderer, a Hessian gendarme, committed suicide. As a result, the crime has never been publicly investigated. All three victims were buried in a common grave, which is unusual. Their fate was engraved on the stone, but was forgotten the more it weathered. Only after translation of the copy of the Memorbuch, which in its recording of this deed is reminiscent in its diction of the medieval Nuremberg Martyrology, are details known again. Berthold Rosenthal and his wife managed to escape to America in 1940. He was able to save his records.

„My father had cigar factories in Mannheim, and also in Lorsch and Heppenheim, and at times employed more than a thousand people.“ So begins Henry Morgenthau Sr.’s biography. After coming to America from Germany in 1866, the Morgenthaus made history in international diplomacy, American domestic politics, and in the criminal justice system there. They amassed a fortune in Manhattan real estate, advised presidents, pushed the New Deal, uncovered the Armenian genocide, rescued victims of the Holocaust, fought wars in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and built a dynasty of public service on the foundation of their private wealth. In the words of former Mayor Ed Koch, they were „the closest thing to a royal family in New York City.“ Like the Morgenthaus, the Lorschs had based their wealth in the Electoral Palatinate. The first head of Mannheim’s Jewish community was Samuel Lorsch. When he went to Mannheim around 1660, he took the name of his place of origin as his family name, as did all Jews who had answered the call of the Elector. As court Jews, the Lorschs followed Karl Theodor to Munich 100 years later, when he took the Wittelsbach throne there. Finally, the banker Heinrich Lorsch emigrated from there to America in 1850. His son Albert became a gold, currency and diamond trader. In Maiden Lane, in what is now Manhattan’s Financial District, he built one of the city’s first high-rise buildings in 1894. From its walls, the Lorsch name was visible for far and wide. Diagonally opposite the Lorsch Building was the Lawyer’s Title Insurance & Trust building of Henry Morgenthau Sr. Today, the entire area is built up with real estate belonging to the New York Federal Reserve Bank.