Synagogue Square
August Von Voit
August von Voit (1810-70) was the architect of the Kirchheimbolanden Synagogue. While he favored Neo-Romanesque for his many church buildings in the Palatinate, he chose a Moorish-Byzantine style for synagogues, “to commemorate the Jewish people’s origins in the Orient.”
In the spirit of King Ludwig I of Bavaria’s art policy, Voit served as a civil building inspector for the Palatinate district government in Speyer from 1832-41. The central idea was that all state and ecclesiastical construction should be guided by an “artistic idea” rooted in history.
The Kirchheimbolanden Synagogue gave expression to this.
“the Synagogue Fire Spread”
In 1870, the Jewish community of Kirchheimbolanden had 134 members.
The synagogue was their religious center – until November 10, 1938, when the Jewish house of worship in Kirchheimbolanden was also set on fire.
The Holocaust soon followed. – “The synagogue fire spread.”
The last eleven Jewish residents of the town are listed in a “Register of Jews still residing in Kirchheimbolanden” dated December 6, 1939.
Their names are recorded on a memorial stone in the square of the former synagogue.
Only two of those listed survived the “Third Reich”.
“the Flames Blazed Fiercely against the Dark Sky”
In November 1938, synagogues burned across Germany – including in Kirchheimbolanden.
One of the last eleven residents of the town – Carl Hausmann, who was six years old at the time – reported on this in his life story published in 2011:
The day after the Reichspogromnacht, on November 10, 1938, the Nazis set fire to the synagogue in Kirchheimbolanden. That night, my parents took me to the burning synagogue. The flames blazed fiercely against the dark sky. On Saturdays and during holidays, my father, brother, and I had gone there for services. It was fatefully significant that my parents made me an eyewitness to the destruction, because not too many years later I would become one of the two survivors among the last remaining Jews in the city. (The other, Elise Usner, who was deported to Theresienstadt with an “Aryan” – a camp in Czechoslovakia, today the Czech Republic, which was a transit station on the way to the death camps. However, Hitler’s rule ended one month after her deportation, shortly before the great defeat of the German army that ended World War II in Europe, and Elise Usner returned to Kirchheimbolanden in June of the same year.)
Carl Hausmann survived his deportation to France and found a new future in the USA.
A series of “memorial sites” on Synagogue Square commemorate the Jewish past in Kirchheimbolanden, including three “memorial stones” from the concentration camps Auschwitz, Dachau, and Natzweiler-Struthof.
Another “memorial site” is the Jewish Cemetery in Judental with its 172 gravestones. Most of them date from the 19th century; the oldest dates back to 1603.
They remain a reminder against forgetting.
