Rhina is a village in eastern Hesse, Germany, belonging to the Haunetal municipality within the district of Hersfeld-Rotenburg. In 2004, the population of Rhina consisted of 509 residents.
The village was first mentioned in documents in 1003. However, the first traces of humans in the area are from the early Paleolithic Era and Middle Stone Age from the years 10000 to 6000BC. Settlement during the Middle Ages occurred mainly in the area around the German abbey at Fulda, although sovereignty over the area would be widely established by German knights. From the late Middle Ages on, the families from Trubenbach (today Truembach), Bimbach, Buchenau, and Haune in Rhina were considerably wealthy. In the 15th century, the Landgraviate of Hesse succeeded in acquiring rights to the estate of Rhina. During the time of the Reformation, this led to violent conflicts between Hesse and the noble families over rights to the village.
The church of Rhina was originally consecrated in the name of St. Nicholas. In 1529 and 1530, it was reformed. During the Reformation, the local production of pottery developed in the village. The first evidence of the presence of Jews in the village is documented from 1631 during the Thirty Years War. From the 18th century especially, the Jewish community grew at a regular rate, the first synagogue being erected in 1782. In 1806, Rhina came under the rule of the Kingdom of Westphalia. The neighboring village of Wehrda was the seat of the nobility and Rhina belonged to the canton of Holzheim . The church of Rhina was re-built in 1814. In 1821, Rhina was incorporated into the Hünfeld district of the Hessian province of Fulda. Rhina's synagogue was rebuilt from 1831 to 1832. In 1835, the first village-wide local elections were held. A Jewish cemetery was created in 1837. The residents of the villages of Wehrda, Rhina, Schletzenrod, and Wetzlos rebelled against the noble lordship of the region in the Revolution of 1848. In the course of the conflict, attacks were also carried out against Rhina's Jews. In 1862, following a great increase in the Jewish population of Rhinda, a Jewish grade school was opened. Rhina received its first telephone in 1902, and in 1912 developed water and plumbing infrastructure. In 1933, following an order by the NSDAP district leadership as well as the office of the regional administration, the Jewish members of the municipal council were forced to resign from their posts. From 1934, assaults on Jewish property and against those of Jewish faith began to occur. In 1935, those attending the synagogue were beaten up. In 1937, a catastrophic storm befell the village. On 10 November 1938, Rhina's large, integrated Jewish school was burnt to the ground. Rhina's mayor declared the village "judenfrei" (free of Jews) on 1 March 1939. 49 people were deported by train to ghettos and murdered in death camps. Beginning in 1949, reparations were made to surviving Jews and to the JRSO (Jewish Restitution Successor Organization) within the American occupation zone. In 1965, a village community center was dedicated on the former site of Rhina's synagogue. Rhina was greatly affected by floods after an overflowing of the Haune River in 1966. In 1971, within the framework of a redistricting act in Hesse, Rhina was incorporated into the community of Haunetal.
Gelnhausen is a town, and the capital of the Main-Kinzig-Kreis, in Hesse, Germany. It is located approximately 40 kilometers east of Frankfurt am Main, between the Vogelsberg mountains and the Spessart range at the river Kinzig. It is one of the eleven towns in the district. Gelnhausen has around 22,000 inhabitants.
Jewish emancipation was the external process in various nations in Europe of eliminating Jewish disabilities, e.g. Jewish quotas, to which European Jews were then subject, and the recognition of Jews as entitled to equality and citizenship rights. It included efforts within the community to integrate into their societies as citizens. It occurred gradually between the late 18th century and the early 20th century. Jewish emancipation followed the Age of Enlightenment and the concurrent Jewish Enlightenment. Various nations repealed or superseded previous discriminatory laws applied specifically against Jews where they resided. Before the emancipation, most Jews were isolated in residential areas from the rest of the society; emancipation was a major goal of European Jews of that time, who worked within their communities to achieve integration in the majority societies and broader education. Many became active politically and culturally within wider European civil society as Jews gained full citizenship. They emigrated to countries offering better social and economic opportunities, such as United Kingdom and the Americas. Some European Jews turned to Socialism, and others to Zionism.
Samuel Oppenheimer was an Ashkenazi Jewish banker, imperial court diplomat, factor, and military supplier for the Holy Roman Emperor. He enjoyed the special favor of Emperor Leopold I, to whom he advanced considerable sums of money for the Great Turkish War. Prince Eugene of Savoy brought him a large number of valuable Hebrew manuscripts from Turkey, which became the nucleus of the famous David Oppenheim Library, now part of the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Bechtolsheim is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Alzey-Land, whose seat is in Alzey.
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.
Meyer Kayserling was a German rabbi and historian.
Haunetal is a community in Hersfeld-Rotenburg district in eastern Hesse, Germany. Haunetal is the district's southernmost municipality.
Hauneck is a community in Hersfeld-Rotenburg district in eastern Hesse, Germany.
Burghaun is a municipality in the district of Fulda in the state of Hessen in Germany.
The former free imperial city Pfeddersheim is a borough of Worms since 1969. It became a borough after 2,000 years of independent history.
From about 1590 on, there had been a Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg, whose qehilla existed until its compulsory merger with the Ashkenazi congregation in July 1939. The first Sephardic settlers were Portuguese Marranos, who had fled their country under Philip II and Philip III, at first concealing their religion in their new place of residence. Many of them had emigrated from Spain in the belief that they had found refuge in Portugal.
The history of the Jews in Speyer reaches back over 1,000 years. In the Middle Ages, the city of Speyer, Germany, was home to one of the most significant Jewish communities in the Holy Roman Empire. Its significance is attested to by the frequency of the Ashkenazi Jewish surname Shapiro/Shapira and its variants Szpira/Spiro/Speyer. After many ups and downs throughout history, the community was totally wiped out in 1940 during the Holocaust. With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 Jews again settled in Speyer and a first assembly took place in 1996.
The Hamburg Temple was the first permanent Reform synagogue and the first ever to have a Reform prayer rite. It operated in Hamburg (Germany) from 1818 to 1938. On 18 October 1818 the Temple was inaugurated and later twice moved to new edifices, in 1844 and 1931, respectively.
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".
The history of the Jews in Hamburg in Germany, is recorded from at least 1590 on. Since the 1880s Jews of Hamburg have lived primarily in the neighbourhoods of Grindel, earlier in the New Town, where the Sephardic Community "Neveh Shalom" was established in 1652. Since 1612 there have been toleration agreements with the senate of the prevailingly Lutheran city-state. Also Reformed Dutch merchants and Anglican Britons made similar agreements before. In these agreements the Jews were not permitted to live in the Inner-City, though were also not required to live in ghettos.
Friedrich Christian Delius is a German writer.
The Jestädt Jewish Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery in Jestädt, in the Municipality of Meinhard in the Werra-Meißner-Kreis in the State of Hesse of Germany. A protected cultural monument, it is one of the oldest of its kind in Hesse.
Margarethe Kahn was a German mathematician and Holocaust victim. She was among the first women to obtain a doctorate in Germany. Her doctoral work was on the topology of algebraic curves.
The History of the Jews in Freiburg dates back to the Late Middle Ages when, at the site of today's Wasserstraße and Weberstraße, there was reference to a ghetto. In 1328, a synagogue was located at 6 Weberstraße.
Synagogues of the Swabian type are former synagogues built between 1780 and 1820 in Swabia, Bavaria. They were handsome synagogues of a specific style, reflecting the growing self-confidence and the increased acceptance of the Jews of Swabia in the 18th century.