The Jewish Community of Siegen (1884–1943)

The central figure of the Siegerland Jewish community was the textile merchant Meier Leser Stern (center), born in Hohenlimburg in 1834. The photo was taken on October 6, 1920, at the golden wedding anniversary of the Stern couple. Stern’s wife Sara, born in 1850, was a native of Lenneberg and a granddaughter of Isaac Rosenberg. It is not known precisely when Meier Leser Stern (also: Meyer Löser Stern) moved to Siegen as a cattle dealer, but the Sterns were one of the seven Jewish families mentioned in a document in 1870. The couple had five children: Julius (1871–1927), Hermann (1874–1942), Jenny (1875–1930), Emil (1877–1942), and Betty (1890–1942). The eldest son Julius took over his father’s textile business in Sandstraße and managed it until his death in 1927.
Meier Leser Stern was a co-founder of the Siegen synagogue community and its chairman from the beginning until October 1921. He was then appointed honorary chairman. The Siegener Zeitung paid tribute to him in 1914 on the occasion of his 80th birthday with the words: „He raised the religious community, which originally consisted of only a few families, to a state-recognized religious community. His undisputed creations are the local Jewish public adult education center, the synagogue, an ornament to the town, and the establishment of the new Jewish cemetery in the Hermelsbach.“ Meier Leser Stern died on October 15, 1924, his wife Sara on February 2, 1933. Eight of their 18 grandchildren were able to emigrate in time and survived the Shoah in Australia, England, Israel, and the USA.
From 1867 onwards, mainly Jewish merchant and trader families from villages in the neighboring regions of the Sauerland and the Wittgenstein came to the growing industrial city of Siegen. They were part of a migration movement that could be observed throughout the German Empire in the last third of the 19th century: with the construction of the railroad network and industrialization, more and more rural residents moved to the cities, where they hoped for a better life. In 1871, with the founding of the German Empire, Jews received legal and statutory equality for the first time in German history, putting them on an equal footing with the Christian majority of the population. However, they were still denied high positions in the state and the military during the empire.
In Siegen, the number of Jews increased from 23 (1870) to 111 (1880), so that the desire for a structured community life grew. By way of comparison, the population of Siegen grew from around 11,000 to 15,000 people in the same period. The proportion of Jews in the city population was therefore less than one percent. In total, 512,000 Jews lived in the German Reich at that time; most of them in Berlin.
Like everywhere else where Jews wanted to settle permanently, the Siegen Jews were the first to acquire a plot of land for a cemetery: in 1871 on the Lindenberg. The establishment of a private religious school also dates back to 1871. It was recognized by the state in 1885 and was in operation until 1915. In 1884, the official Jewish community was finally founded, for which its chairman, Meier Leser Stern, acquired a plot of land „aufm Obergraben“ seven years later, in 1891, for the construction of a synagogue. It took another decade, however, before Stern applied for a building permit in September 1902. The synagogue, which had room for 90 men and 70 women, was consecrated on July 22, 1904. Until then, Siegen’s Jewry had gathered for services in their homes or in rented premises such as an inn or a factory building. In 1912, they were able to establish another burial ground in the municipal Hermelsbach cemetery. The social concerns of the community were taken care of by the Israelite Women’s Association, founded in 1900.
The community numbered around a hundred members throughout its existence: 127 (1885), 97 (1900), 130 (1925) and 122 (1933). While the number of Jews remained about the same, the city population grew to almost 33,000. Another hundred or so Jews lived in villages in the district. For the most part, however, they were only in loose contact with the Siegen community and gathered in their own prayer rooms, as in Hilchenbach and Littfeld. At most, they attended services in Siegen on the high holidays such as Passover or Yom Kippur. After the First World War, an Eastern Jewish family originating from Poland moved to Siegen for the first time.
The Siegen Jews were mostly cattle dealers, butchers and merchants, who in the course of time opened small stores, especially around the market in the upper town. Only a few of them achieved relative prosperity; the vast majority belonged to the petty bourgeoisie, lived in poor conditions and had to fight every day anew for economic survival. The piety of the Siegen Jews was traditional, but they were also open to innovations, as the installation of a harmonium in the synagogue shows.
The community could neither finance an organ nor a rabbi, so that the Jewish teachers worked as preachers and cantors. The most important among them was the innkeeper’s son Simon Grünewald, born in 1870 in Pömbsen in East Westphalia, who worked in Siegen from 1897 until his forced emigration in June 1939. Grünewald died in New York in December 1939, a few weeks after his arrival in the USA.

The teacher, preacher, and cantor Simon Grünewald (1870–1939) was the second central personality of the Siegen Jewish community besides Meier Leser Stern. The undated photograph shows Grünewald in a circle of his pupils.
Politically, the Jews in the Siegerland were mostly loyal to the Kaiser or German national conservatives. So it was no question that their young men volunteered to take part in the First World War: 32 Jewish soldiers from the Siegerland fought for the German Empire, eight of them did not return from the battlefields. The cantor and teacher Grünewald was particularly patriotically minded. In 1915 he published a volume of „war poems“ which read:
This is the way of the Siegerländer:
The outside is rough and hard,
His mind, however, is honest, his soul is mild;
And where great things are to be accomplished, -
To his glory be it proclaimed:
The Siegerländer is always there!
The Jews of Siegerland lived in a special region: In the region, which was characterized by strict religious Calvinism and the piety movement of Pietism, the Christian-social court preacher and politician Adolf Stoecker (1835–1909) had his constituency for three decades. Stoecker was one of the leading figures in the anti-Semitic movement, which increasingly went public from 1879: When the first major economic crisis of the 19th century occurred in Germany after the stock market crash of 1873, a particularly aggressive form of hostility toward Jews emerged. Ancient anti-Jewish stereotypes, passed down from generation to generation, combined with modern anti-Semitism: Christian religious anti-Judaism, envy of the visible success of many Jews, and the unbroken definition of the German Reich as a Christian state combined with a new pseudo-scientific ideology. According to this ideology, humanity could be divided into different races, some of which were supposedly superior – the Germanic peoples, for example – and others inferior. The Jews were now neither a religion nor a nation, but a fundamentally different and, what is more, inferior „race“: they were dehumanized and equated with pathogens, insects or parasites, which one was allowed to „eliminate“, „exterminate“, „render harmless“, „remove“ and „exterminate“. The centuries-old antagonism between Jews and Christians turned into the far more momentous and ultimately deadly antagonism between Jews and Germans.
With his anti-Jewish agitation, Stoecker made anti-Semitism „acceptable“ and was later celebrated by the National Socialists as the „prophet of the Third Reich. In the Siegerland, he achieved extraordinarily good election results; in 1887, for example, he was elected to the Reichstag with 77.9 percent of the vote. Siegen historian Ulrich Friedrich Opfermann sums up the atmosphere in the empire as „Christianity, bourgeois decency and anti-Semitism as a synthesis.“ It was therefore not surprising that the Siegerland could become a stronghold of the National Socialists: In the last democratic elections in November 1932, the NSDAP received 56.1 percent of the vote – the average in the German Reich was 33.1 percent.
Not only during the Nazi era, but already in the turmoil of upheaval at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, there were anti-Semitic riots in Siegen. Although around 100,000 Jewish soldiers fought for the empire in the First World War and 12,000 of them were killed, conservative and anti-democratic forces in the Siegerland also blamed the Jews for the defeat of the empire. Their demonstrative commitment to Germanism had been of no use to the Jews of the Siegerland: The untruthful slogan „Everywhere her face grins, except in the trenches“ could also be heard and read in Siegen. In early June 1920, the night before the unveiling of a memorial plaque for the Jewish victims of the war, the synagogue was smeared with anti-Semitic slogans.
During the Empire and also during the Weimar Republic, when German Jewry experienced its heyday, there was hardly any social contact between the small Jewish minority and the Christian majority society in Siegen beyond business connections. Unlike in Laasphe, forty kilometers away, where Jews were integrated into small-town life, only very few Siegen Jews belonged to local associations. They were not represented in political parties or local political bodies. „Laasphe was the exception, Siegen the rule,“ says historian Opfermann.
With his anti-Jewish agitation, Stoecker made anti-Semitism „acceptable“ and was later celebrated by the National Socialists as the „prophet of the Third Reich. In the Siegerland, he achieved extraordinarily good election results; in 1887, for example, he was elected to the Reichstag with 77.9 percent of the vote. Siegen historian Ulrich Friedrich Opfermann sums up the atmosphere in the empire as „Christianity, bourgeois decency and anti-Semitism as a synthesis.“ It was therefore not surprising that the Siegerland could become a stronghold of the National Socialists: In the last democratic elections In the last democratic elections in November 1932, the NSDAP received 56.1 percent of the vote – the average in the German Reich was 33.1 percent.
Not only during the Nazi era, but already in the turmoil of upheaval at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, there were anti-Semitic riots in Siegen. Although around 100,000 Jewish soldiers fought for the empire in the First World War and 12,000 of them were killed, conservative and anti-democratic forces in the Siegerland also blamed the Jews for the defeat of the empire. Their demonstrative commitment to Germanism had been of no use to the Jews of the Siegerland: The untruthful slogan „Everywhere her face grins, except in the trenches“ could also be heard and read in Siegen. In early June 1920, the night before the unveiling of a memorial plaque for the Jewish victims of the war, the synagogue was smeared with anti-Semitic slogans.
During the Empire and also during the Weimar Republic, when German Jewry experienced its heyday, there was hardly any social contact between the small Jewish minority and the Christian majority society in Siegen beyond business connections. Unlike in Laasphe, forty kilometers away, where Jews were integrated into small-town life, only very few Siegen Jews belonged to local associations. They were not represented in political parties or local political bodies. „Laasphe was the exception, Siegen the rule,“ says historian Opfermann.
The Jews of Siegerland did not differ in their appearance from the Christians of Siegerland; they wore the same clothes, suits, hats and hairstyles. For the Christian Siegerlanders, their Jewish neighbors nevertheless remained a „minority belonging at most conditionally to the national community“ (Opfermann).
In their memoirs, Siegen Jews report both a good neighborly relationship with individual Christians and a far-reaching coexistence of Jews and Christians. „The Jewish community lived in a self-imposed ghetto,“ according to Hugo Herrmann (1898–1993), the son of the last community leader Eduard Herrmann and one of the few survivors who returned to Siegen after the Shoah. Hugo Hermann, like his father a soldier in World War I, had founded a Zionist group in the community in the 1920s, but it played only an outsider role. In March 1940 he was able to emigrate with his family to Palestine. His father Eduard left Siegen in August 1940, but was killed when the emigrant ship „Patria“ was blown up in Haifa harbor in November 1940.
Text: Uwe von Seltmann (2021)
The outside is rough and hard,
His mind, however, is honest, his soul is mild;
And where great things are to be done, -
To his glory be it proclaimed:
The Siegerländer is always there!