Jewish History of Frankfurt, Germany
Ghettos, Rothschilds, and the Holocaust
Frankfurt has two Jewish Museums, both worth seeing. The first is small and commemorates the destruction of the Jewish ghetto (the first ghetto in Europe). It was called the Judengasse, where Jews were forced to live from 1462 to 1796.
The houses in the Judengasse (where up to 3,000 Jews were forced to live) had names instead of addresses. When Jews were required to take German surnames, the family whose house was The Red Shield (Dem Roten Schild), became the Rothschilds. ().
The main Jewish museum, in what was once the spectacular Rothschild mansion, opened on November 9, 1988, which was the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The original building was mostly destroyed during the war, but it’s been beautifully restored. It’s an interactive museum, with lots of technology and sections that explain Judaism to those who’ve never encountered any practicing Jews. Two young Asian men walked through the exhibits behind us, stopping to look at kiddish cups and Torah scrolls, listening to descriptions of the lives of Jewish scientists, writers, thinkers, and artists who were murdered or who fled Germany.
I imagined the Jews of Frankfurt going door to door as they were planning the museum, asking Jews who survived to donate their photo albums and ketubot (marriage contracts), their letters during the war, and memories of those they lost.
My mother did something similar when the Chicago Holocaust Museum was planned out of a storefront in Skokie back in the 1970s. To help fill the shelves of the new museum, she (and many others) approached family members who survived the war. My mother’s cousins were sponsored by her father, my grandfather, who’d come to the U.S. well before the war. They survived Aushwitz because 1) they’d been young and strong enough, and 2) the Nazis didn’t get to Hungary until 1943.
The second, smaller Jewish museum in Frankfurt opened in 1992, on the spot where the walls of 19 houses from the original Judengasse had been destroyed and buried under concrete. The archeological find sparked intense debate in the city. The compromise was to remove the remains of five old stone houses and rebuild them on the ground floor of a large administrative building. .
It was astounding to walk through this little gem of a museum and see shards, tiny pieces of Jewish ritual objects, and a facsimile of the ghetto homes. But the most moving part for me was walking outside of the museum, past the wall that surrounds what was once a Jewish cemetery. Hundreds and hundreds of small metal boxes have been welded permanently onto the stone wall and inscribed with the names and places of Jews killed during the Holocaust.
I’m tearing up remembering how it felt to walk by those boxes, many with small stones left by visitors, as if they’d been buried with a tombstone in a cemetery and not burned in ovens with nothing but ash to prove they ever existed.
Luckily for us, but too bad for the fools of the world who are now questioning what happened during the Holocaust….Germany kept meticulous records of the names, addresses, and mode of death for every Nazi victim. Happily, since the Holocaust ended, Germany has used its excellent record-keeping to build a better society.
