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.”