Commemorating the Jewish Community of Würzburg
Guardians of Memory
In 1945, after the end of the war, 52 Jews arrived in Würzburg, of them 24 members of the former Jewish community. They found temporary shelter in the former structures of the Jewish hospital, which during the war years had been converted into residential apartments. The returned Jews began to gather for communal prayers in a house which had previously been used by the local Nazi party, and after the war had been assigned to a Jewish family. Jewish soldiers and officers in the American army assisted survivors who wished to resettle in Würzburg. David Rosenbaum was elected to serve as the head of the small Jewish community of the city; his main course of action was to assist members of the community in finding living accommodations and work, to renew the communal prayers, and to renovate and restore the Jewish graveyards of Lower Franconia.
Among those who returned from Theresienstadt was Bernhard Behrens, who had been responsible for the Jewish cemetery in Würzburg for forty years, between 1902 and 1942. The city council of Würzburg charged him with restoring the Jewish cemeteries of Würzburg, Heidingsfeld and Höchberg. With the sanction of the local authorities, the Jewish cemetery in Würzburg had been converted during the war into a chicken farm, run by a local Christian villager, and much damage had been sustained to the premises. Jewish tombstones had been "reused" in masonry repair work done to houses and walls throughout the city; 17 such "reused" tombstones from the 14th century were subsequently discovered. Behrens was also given the responsibility of erecting a memorial for the residents of Würzburg who had been murdered in the Holocaust. The resulting memorial plaque was unveiled in November 1945, and placed adjacent to the 1920 memorial for soldiers from Würzburg who had fallen during the First World War.
The convert to Judaism Baron Ernst Abraham von Manstein is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Würzburg.
Today, the Jews of Würzburg are commemorated throughout the city through the artistic project of the Stolpersteine, literally "stumbling stones", a project created by the German artist Gunter Demnig. These brass "cobblestones" are embedded into the sidewalks of the city, in front of the former houses and workplaces of the Nazi’s victims. Each stone details the name of one victim, their date of birth, and the circumstances of their death.
Baron Ernst Abraham von Manstein
Ernst von Manstein was born to a well-known noble family in the German province of Thuringia, in 1869. Around 1890 he arrived in Würzburg as a soldier in the 9th infantry division of the German Army. Thanks to his musical talents he was stationed in the regimental orchestra. It was in Würzburg, and nearby Heidingsfeld, that von Manstein became acquainted with Judaism, and expressed a desire to convert. His teachers were Rabbi Lipman Bar-Bamberger and Jonas Ansbacher, who was also a Mohel (entrusted with performing Jewish ritual circumcision). Von Manstein completed his conversion to Judaism in Amsterdam, where he was circumcised. He returned to Würzburg, became a member of the local Jewish community, and married the writer Franzisca Bezold, herself a convert to Judaism, who was 19 years his senior. Baron von Manstein studied art history at the University of Strasburg and obtained qualifications for teaching art. In Würzburg he worked as an art teacher in various institutions, among them the Jewish Teachers Seminary.
During the Nazi rule von Manstein was forced to give up all his teaching positions other than the Jewish Teachers Seminary, where he was allowed to continue working. His attempts to emigrate to Eretz Israel were foiled by the authorities. In 1941 his wife passed away, and was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Würzburg. The engravings and decorations adoring her tombstone were created by von Manstein himself. Von Manstein’s family connections – the adopted son of his brother was the Nazi general Erich von Manstein – as well as his being legally defined as an “Aryan”, protected him from being deported to the East, yet in all other respects he shared the fate of the Jews of the city. He was transferred to the “Jewish House” on Domerschulstrasse, where he lived until he was hospitalized. When he died in Würzburg in 1944, at the age of 75, the Nazis staged a funeral service for him: his casket, wrapped in the Nazi flag, was carried by uniformed SS men, and buried in the municipal cemetery. As early as 1946 Rabbi Dr. Sigmund Hanover, who at that time was living in the United States, began lobbying give the baron a Jewish burial. In 1960 his casket was exhumed and reburied next to his wife, in the Jewish cemetery of Würzburg.
Stolpersteine
An ongoing artistic commemoration project, spanning various European cities, which was conceived by the artist Gunter Demnig. Demnig’s Stolpersteine – literary, “stumbling stones” – are small brass plaques, embedded into the sidewalks of various cities, in order to remind the passersby of the last addresses of the Nazi victims. They can be found in over 600 towns and cities across Germany, Austria, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Norway and the Ukraine. Each Stolperstein is a private memorial to a victim of Nazism, whose life was connected to the location in which the stone was placed.
Demnig has stated that a person is forgotten only if his name is forgotten. By placing the stones in front of the buildings in which the victims lived, the Stolpersteine restore the memory of the victims to the physical locations to which they were connected while they were still alive. Each stone begins with the words “Here lived”; a single stone commemorates a single person, and contains a single name.
