Landesrabbiner are spiritual heads of the Jewish communities of a country, province, or district, particularly in Germany and Austria. The office is a result of the legal condition of the Jews in medieval times when the Jewish communities formed a unit for the purposes of taxation. As the community had to pay certain taxes to the government, the latter had to appoint some one who should be responsible to it for their prompt collection, and who consequently had to be invested with a certain authority. The office of Landesrabbiner had no ecclesiastical meaning until the 18th century, when the various governments began to consider it their duty to care for the spiritual welfare of the Jews. Such ecclesiastical authority, owing to the strictly congregational constitution of the communities, never took root among the Jews.
Between the 12th century and modern times, Basel has been home to three Jewish communities. The medieval community thrived at first but ended violently with the Basel massacre of 1349. As with many of the violent anti-Judaic events of the time, it was linked to the outbreak of the Black Death. At the end of the 14th century, a second community formed. But it was short-lived and disbanded before the turn of the century. For the following 400 years, there was no Jewish community in Basel. Today, there are several communities, ranging from liberal to religious to orthodox, and there are still more Jews who don’t belonging to any community.
Aaron Tänzer was a rabbi in Austria and Germany, chaplain and author.
Adolf Lewin was a German rabbi and author. He was born in Pinne, Grand Duchy of Posen on 23 September 1843. Lewin was educated at the Jewish Theological Seminary and at the University of Breslau. In 1872 he was appointed rabbi in Koźmin, later in Coblenz, and in 1886 was called to the rabbinate of Freiburg im Breisgau. He died in 1910.
Abraham (Adolf) Berliner was a German theologian and historian, born in Obersitzko, in the Grand Duchy of Posen, Prussia. He received his first education under his father, who was teacher in Obersitzko. He continued his education under various rabbis, preparing himself at the same time for the University of Leipzig, where he received the degree of doctor of philosophy.
The history of the Jews in Laupheim began in the first half of the 18th century. Until the second half of the 19th century, the Jewish community in Laupheim, expanded continuously to become the largest of its kind in Württemberg. During this period, the Jewish community gradually assimilated to its Christian surroundings and its members prospered until the beginning of the Nazi-period in 1933. With the deportation of the last remaining Jews in 1942, more than 200 years of Jewish history in Laupheim forcibly came to an end.
Moritz Güdemann was an Austrian rabbi and historian. He served as chief rabbi of Vienna.
Meyer Kayserling was a German rabbi and historian.
Heinrich Marx was a lawyer and the father of the revolutionary leader and influential socialist thinker Karl Marx.
The history of the Jews in Cologne is conjectured to date back possibly as far as the late Roman Empire, and is officially documented from the period of the High Middle Ages. Over its history, the Jewish community of Cologne has suffered persecutions, many expulsions, massacres and destruction. The community numbered about 19,500 people before its dispersal, murders and destruction in the 1930s by the Nazis before and during World War II. The community has re-established itself and now numbers about 4,500 members. Because of its historical continuity, today's Jewish synagogue calls itself the "oldest Jewish congregation north of the Alps".
Erich Klibansky was headmaster and teacher of Jawne, the first Jewish Gymnasium of Rhineland in Cologne.
The Jawne was a Jewish Reformrealgymnasium in Cologne.
The NS Documentation Centre of the City of Cologne was founded by a resolution passed by the Cologne city council on December 13, 1979 and has become the largest regional memorial site in all of Germany for the victims of the Nazis. Since 1988, it has been housed in "EL-DE Haus," the EL-DE building, named for the initials of its owner, Catholic businessman Leopold Dahmen. This building was the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo between December 1935 and March 1945. In the final months of the war, several hundred people, most of them foreign forced laborers, were murdered in the courtyard of the building. In a bit of historical irony, the EL-DE building remained largely untouched by the ravages of the war.
Zündorf Synagogue was a synagogue and cemetery in Cologne, Germany. Zündorf was an important trading center, of Jewish farmers, butchers, moneylenders, small artisans or goods dealers from the early 18th century.
Leopold Jakob Jehuda Treitel was a German Jewish classical scholar in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the last rabbi of the Jewish community in the town of Laupheim, then Württemberg, Southern Germany.
Dr. Willy Cohn was a German historian and teacher. During the Nazi era, he documented the Jewish life in Breslau in his diaries, until he and his family were deported to German-occupied Lithuania and killed.
Vincenz Statz was a Neo-Gothic German architect, mainly active in the Rhineland.
TheJudensau at the choir stalls of Cologne Cathedral is a medieval, antisemitic wood carving at the side of one of the seats in the choir of Cologne Cathedral. It was produced between 1308 and 1311. It shows a Jews' sow, a folk art image of Jews in obscene contact with a large female pig, which in Judaism is an unclean animal. It is one of the oldest representations of this theme. Directly beside is another antisemitic motif, which is generally interpreted as an illustration of the blood libel legend. This combination is only known from one other case, a painting from the 15th century at the Old Bridge in Frankfurt.
Udo Mainzer is a German art historian and monument conservator. He held office until September 2011. as director of the LVR-Amt für Denkmalpflege im Rheinland and Landeskonservator of the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.
Moritz Geisenheimer was a German merchant, playwright, activist of Jewish Emancipation and the German Gymnastics and National Movement, one of the first sports officials in Düsseldorf, and a publicist and politician of the democratic movement during the German revolutions of 1848–1849.
