Jewish Cemetery Fronhausen-Lahn
by Annemarie Schlag
Location and Description
Photo: Hahn 2008, alemannia judaica
The horse dealer Simon Löwenstein donated the grounds for the cemetery on “Kratzeberg” to the Jewish Community on August 1st, 1873. Between this date and the closure of the cemetery by the Nazis in June 1940, 42 burials took place here, seven of those burials were children. The first gravestone was set for Sara Löwenstein, who died aged 36 on September 22nd, 1873.
The second burial was the daughter of the property donor, Simon Löwenstein, and his wife, Ester. Their daughter Rosa died on March 26th, 1874, only four and a half months old. The last funeral to be conducted on the site was for Minchen Sonn in 1938. There is no stone for her. Auguste Giedel Löwenstein died on June 21st, 1941. It is unclear whether she was buried in the cemetery in Fronhausen or in the collective graveyard for Jews at the address Alter Kirchhainer Weg in Marburg.
The cemetery was not sold during the Nazi Regime. At the end of the war in 1945, commanders of the American Army ordered that knocked over gravestones be reinstalled. The Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO), whose finances were overseen by offices in Nuremberg, gained control of the property by decree of the Reparations Department in Giessen. The Landesverband der jüdischen Gemeinden in Hessen (Association of Jewish Communities in Hessen) acquired the property in 1960.
The cemetery was heavily vandalized in March 1986. The perpetrators torn down part of the wooden fence and knocked over 17 gravestones. Two of the stones split down the center. The district administrator put out a reward of 1000 Deutsche Mark for leads to help apprehend the vandals. The cemetery was restored, but they never caught the criminals.
All 39 tombstones are for single graves and are made of sandstone. The stones are carved simply, some with slight ornamentation at the top. The inscriptions are in Hebrew on the front, some have a text in German on the back. Each inscription begins with the burial phrase “Buried here is” in Hebrew. The phrase “May his/her soul be bound in the bundle of life” ends the inscription. Karl Löwenstein, who was born in Fronhausen to Moses I, and Moses’ wife Henriette, née Schott, lived in Berlin from the beginning of the 20th century. A Holocaust survivor, Karl Löwenstein donated a memorial stone for the victims of the Nazis in 1964.
The German inscription can be translated as follows:
In warning exhortation in memory of the members of the jewish community of Fronhausen who fell victim of nazi persecution 1933 -1945
The inscription on the back reads:
Dedicated by Karl Löwenstein
The gate to the cemetery is locked. Visitors can borrow the key from the town administration center (Gemeindeverwaltung.) Visiting is not permitted on Jewish holidays or on Saturdays out of respect for the Sabbath. Male visitors should cover their heads while on cemetery grounds.
All photo credits: Annemarie Schlag, Fronhausen
You can find a list of sources on the website of the Landesgeschichtlichen Informationssystems Hessen.
The Jewish Cemetery lies between the soccer field and the tennis courts, right next to the elementary school on the mountain known as the Stollberg. It is 1400 m2 and is enclosed by a fence and a hedge.
How to get to
The Jewish cemetery is located on the Stollberg between the soccer pitch and the tennis court, in the immediate vicinity of the elementary school. It is 14 acres in size and is surrounded by a fence and a beech hedge.
History of the Jewish Community in Roth
From the 16th to the 20th Century
by Annegret Wenz-Haubfleisch
The Protectorate in the 16th - 18th Centuries
The villages of Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein once made up the Schenkisch Eigen, a set of lands under the sovereign control of the noble lineage Schenk zu Schweinsberg. This ancient noble family possessed extensive rights over this territory, including the right to settle Jews on the land. They did this by selling Schutzbriefe (letters of protection) to persons of Jewish faith, a lucrative source of income.
Early evidence of Jews living in the Schenkisch Eigen is found in a 1594/95 register of taxes levied for military protection against the Turks. According to this source, there were seven Jews living in the area who had to pay taxes on property worth 200 Gulden. Each of the seven had to pay 3 ½ Heller for defense against the Turks. It is probable that some of the seven Jews and their families lived in Roth.
There is definitive evidence from the year 1666 that four Jewish families were living in Roth. In 1710 there were six Jewish families with a total of 33 people. By 1737 the number had grown to 13 families with 54 people. In 1744 the Landgrave of Hesse began to intervene in the settlement of Jews in the villages and towns under his control. He had a register made of all the Jews living in his domain, which included the names of each person in the family. He then decided who would and would not be granted further right of abode in which place. As a result of this action, most of the ca. 38 people (nine families) living in Roth lost their right to live there. Only two families were allowed to stay. After this, the Jewish Community in the area remained very small for several decades.
Emancipation and Integration in the 19th and 20th centuries
It was not until the time of Napoleon’s brother Jérôme’s rule in the Kingdom of Westphalia (1807-1813) that the Jews were first awarded equal standing as citizens. Jews from outside Roth married into the community and paved the way for demographic development in the 19th century. By 1816, a total of four families were again living in Roth: Bergenstein, Höchster, Stern, and Wäscher. By the middle of the century the number of families doubled. The younger sons of the four main families stayed in Roth, and a new family with the surname Nathan arrived in the village. At that time there were about 50 Jews living in Roth, and they made up about 10 percent of the population. By percent Roth had one of the largest Jewish communities in the area around Marburg. When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were still six families in Roth: Bergenstein, Höchster, Nathan, Wäscher, and 3 families with the surname Stern, a total of 32 people.
The Jews of Roth, Fronhausen, and Lohra formed a single worship community in the 19th century. By the middle of the 18th century, they had a synagogue and a Jewish cemetery in Roth.
A Jewish elementary school was also established. The schoolteacher usually lived in Roth, but also had to give lessons in Fronhausen for the children from Fronhausen and Lohra. It hasn’t been possible to locate where the school in Roth used to be. The Fronhausen Community split from the larger community in 1881, and bought a building for use as a prayer-house and Jewish school. The Jewish children in Roth began attending the public school at this time.
As was typical for Jews in rural areas, the Jews in Roth earned their living through trade, usually dry goods, notions, and fabric or grain and feed, as well as livestock. Well into the 20th century, they traveled the countryside, either by horse and cart, by foot with a Saint Bernard and a small wagon, or eventually by motorcycle, selling their wares. Some Jews owned land and livestock and ran small farms.
Around the end of the 19th century, members of the Jewish community began joining the local athletic and choir clubs so popular among the general population at this time. There were also Jewish members of the local theater group in Roth. This involvement indicates the extent to which people of Jewish faith were integrated in the village community. Contemporaries bear witness to the positive neighborly relations between Jews and the rest of the population in the 1920’s. Christian and Jewish children played together and formed friendships.
Records of the 35th anniversary of the local choir club, show no evidence of ostracism or exclusion by either side in 1926. The Festschrift, a booklet serving as a memorial document marking the occasion, includes men from several Jewish families as members of the club. Some of these men were involved in the festival committees. Hermann Höchster, the Jewish community elder, is listed as an honored member of the club.
The Persecution and Extermination of the Jewish Community (1933-1942)
The historical election results from the time of the Weimar Republic indicate that Roth was not particularly “brown” - the Nazi Party received fewer votes than the district average between 1928 and 1932. However, the situation changed very quickly after Hitler came to power.
A young mother named Selma Roth died suddenly in 1934. According to members of her family, many villagers attended Selma’s funeral; however, it was only one year later that her widower, the fertilizer dealer Markus Roth, was denounced and accused of criminal behavior in court. Roth’s business collapsed in the aftermath. Signs stating “Juden sind hier unerwünscht” (in English: “Jews are not wanted here”) are documented as having been on a business property and on a farm at this time.
Survivors report of nasty pranks and of being excluded from play at school after the Christian children joined the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) and the Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls: the girls’ branch of the Hitler Youth.) Adult Christians began avoiding their Jewish friends and neighbors. Jewish men were not allowed to work and thus could no longer support their families. Jewish families began to see that there was no future for them in Germany. They tried to flee, but not all of them had the financial means and necessary contacts to emigrate. Some members of the Höchster, Roth, and Stern families managed to escape between 1936 and 1938, but only one of the two Stern families was able to flee as a complete unit. Eleven Jews from Roth survived in South Africa, the USA, and in England.
For those left behind, life became increasingly difficult as laws and regulations became stricter and economic hardships ever more pressing. To make matters worse, Roth served as a ghetto village in the summer of 1941. At that time, many Jews were forcibly concentrated into single houses in the cities and centralized places in the countryside. Twenty Jews from Neustadt were forced to moved into living quarters with the remaining members of the Bergenstein, Höchster, Nathan, and Stern families. They lived there in terribly tight conditions. Some of the Jews were deported to Riga in December 1941, the rest were deported to Theresienstadt in September 1942. None of the Jews from Roth survived the ghettos and the concentration camps.
Jewish life in Roth was thus completely exterminated.
