Abstract

In 1777 twenty Jewish families were given permission by the Counts of Liebenstein to settle in the village of Jebenhausen, just two kilometers from Göppingen. These families quickly increased and before long nearly half the population of Jebenhausen was Jewish. One of these families was that of Salomo Ottenheimer, whose descendents later built a factory in Klein-Süssen. After the railroad was built from Plochingen to Göppingen in 1949, a number of the merchants relocated to Göppingen, where they built a synagogue in 1881. Göppingen had four different rabbis, the most important being Rabbi Aron (Arnold) Tänzer, who not only served the Göppingen Jewish community, but the Jews in the surrounding area as well as the non-Jewish population of Göppingen by building a library, teaching adult education courses, and by serving in World War I as a field chaplain. Rabbi Tänzer wrote the only history of the Göppingen Jewish community during its existence, our only source of information about that community. From it we learn about the religious, social, and cultural life of the Göppingen Jews. His second wife, Berta Strauss Tänzer, was deported to Theresienstadt where she was murdered in 1943. In 1929 the Jewish community of Göppingen celebrated Hanukkah at the Hotel Dettelbacher. A picture has survived from a play in which Hugo Lang, his cousins, as well as many of the other Jewish children from Göppingen participated.

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