Tauberrettersheim

November 9, 2007
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

On January 1, 1926, a man named Josef Grunfeld died. According to his obituary, he had acquired much Jewish knowledge in his youth, along with the desire to teach it to others. His whole life had been lived as a constant reminder of his Jewish values. For Josef, teaching and living had always gone hand in hand. He demonstrated this in his family life, in his business activities, and especially in his beloved occupation, being a farmer.

We know that, as a Jewish farmer in Southern Germany in the early years of the twentieth century, he showed a special interest in the newly emerging Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Perhaps he was even a bit wistful that he himself was too entrenched in his home and family to take on the adventure of settling in Palestine. Nevertheless, he believed that the honor of working as a farmer is a gift directly from God and this was his credo as he tried to walk the derech hayashar, ("the right path") as a Jew should. His reputation as a righteous man was proverbial, so that his funeral procession was like a huge caravan of friends -- both Jewish and non-Jewish--with men, women, and children for miles around walking behind his coffin.

At his funeral, the Christian doctor of a nearby town said that Josef was "like an old patriarch, filled with dignity, knowledge and power." Josef's son rose to spoke, but his voice failed him and the newspapers later reported, "His silence spoke more eloquently than words could" [Article from the magazine The Israelite, 28 January 1926].

That was January 1926, possibly one of the last times that the small community of Tauberrettersheim ever met as Jew and non-Jew to celebrate anything together. Jews had first appeared in Tauberrettersheim sometime after 1700 and the first synagogue was built possibly around 1788. In 1845, a new synagogue was constructed. From 1834 to 1899 there was a Jewish cheder or "religious school" and a teacher was imported to instruct the children. And, of course, there was a mikvah, a Jewish "ritual bath"; and a Jewish cemetery.

The whole population of the town in 1867 was 697 and 63 Jews were listed in the town rolls. They were about 9% of the population. By 1880, they had shrunk to 42 souls and only 6% of the population. By 1910, the town was down to 682 souls and there were only 32 Jews. Most of the Jewish families were involved in buying and selling -- except for the teacher and the Jewish butcher, but a few like Josef owned and operated small farms. But by 1924, the Jewish population had shrunk to only 19 souls, less than 3% of the town and by 1933 there were only 10 Jews in the city. The synagogue fell on hard times and was seldom used. The Jews of Tauberrettersheim could no longer afford even to maintain it, so it became the property of the District Rabbinate.

It seems illogical to think of anti-Semitism being at all important in a town of less than 800 people, where only 10 Jews lived and, yet, in 1935 several Jewish homes were defaced. In 1938, when there were only two Jewish houses left in the town, the Nazi SS arrived in troop trucks to conduct a raid in which windows and lamps were broken in these homes and the furniture of the synagogue was vandalized.

Thus, in 1938, on the night of November 9, the synagogue building was defaced, as throughout Germany a government-sponsored pogrom against the Jews raged. That night and the next morning 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Dachau, 815 Jewish shops were destroyed, 29 warehouses were put to the torch, and 171 Jewish dwellings were burned to the ground or otherwise destroyed. Synagogues were special targets, of course, and 191 synagogues across Germany were set ablaze, with 76 completely demolished. Thirty-six Jews were put to death and another thirty or so were severely injured. It was Kristallnacht, "the Night of the Broken Glass." Right after, the last seven Jews left Tauberrettersheim. But the next year, two elderly Jewish women who had tried moving away, returned home. In September 1942, these two elderly women were rounded up and sent to Theresienstadt. In the end, the names of all of the last nine Jews of Tauberrettersheim appear in the role call at Yad VaShem as having perished in Nazi Holocaust -- every last Jew of the village was murdered by the Nazis. No mention is made anywhere of any attempt on the part of the 800 or so non-Jewish residents of Tauberrettersheim to help or save the handful of Jews who lived in their midst. In 1946, the town bought the synagogue building and made plans to transform it into a youth club.

Today, Tauberrettersheim still hovers around 800 souls. From grapes locally grown, they produce a celebrated wine and cook traditional meals, they admire the beauty of nature around them, they lovingly plant gardens of flowers to decorate their neat homes, and they invite you to come and visit if you want a true experience of German conviviality and hospitality. But you will not find any Jew among them. What you will find, remodeled many times, is what is left of the old synagogue building on a street still ironically called Judenhof. These days, it is a fetching and attractive home for long-term convalescents.

That is the sad story of the Jewish community of Tauberrettersheim and its synagogue. Considering the harsh way in which the Jewish community came to an end, maybe it would be better if no Jew would bother to remember that little town. Yet, it is equally harsh to think that more than two hundred years of the existence of a Jewish community should leave not even a trace on the map of world history. It is hard to not remember good people like Josef Grunfeld, the old patriarch of the community who passed away in 1926, but who brought Jew and non-Jew together for a moment of celebration of the human spirit.

Today, a minute trace of that Jewish community of Tauberrettersheim is with us in Spring, Texas, here at Congregation Jewish Community North. A memorial plaque hangs on our synagogue wall to recall the loss of that synagogue and its community. And, once a year, on the occasion of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, we read the name of Tauberrettersheim and its synagogue in our Yahrzeit list.

We are not only saying Yahrzeit for the nine last villagers murdered in the Holocaust -- including the two elderly women forced to end their years in a Nazi concentration camp just because they returned to their beloved hometown -- but also for the tradition and culture of hundreds of years in which Jews played a small but significant role in making Tauberrettersheim "a true experience of German conviviality and hospitality." There is justice in our remembering these people. Without them, no matter what the website of Tauberrettersheim may say, there can no longer be true German conviviality and true German hospitality. All that is left today in Tauberrettersheim is 800 scarred non-Jewish souls. And let us say: Amen.