Aalborg Synagogue

Die jüdische Gemeinde

The first Jew known to have settled in Aalborg was Aron Jacob, also called Jacobsen, a merchant from Frederiksstad (Friedrichstadt) in Schleswig. In 1799 he received permission to live in Viborg, where a small group met for prayer in a rented room, and in 1807 he moved to Aalborg. Together with the merchant Henrik Wulff Bendix he applied for leave to open a synagogue; Rafael Hartvig Cohn, also of Aalborg, sent a rival application, and the government chancellery refused to decide until the two parties came to terms. The community's cemetery was in use by 1810: Aron Jacob's daughter Phillippine was the first person buried there, on 14 February 1810. The congregation had 119 members in 1834 and 123 in 1854. The Danish Jewish Museum names the spirits manufacturer Isidor Henius (1820-1901) and Bernhard Rée (1813-1868), editor of the newspaper Aalborg Stiftstidende, among the Jews of nineteenth-century Aalborg. Like many provincial Danish communities it declined in the later nineteenth century; the sources found do not give later membership figures.

Architektur und Gestaltung

The architect is unknown. Photographs taken between about 1910 and 1930 show a free-standing, gabled hall of exposed brick with its entrance front on Gråbrødregade. The front was framed by a large round arch rising almost to the gable; inside it sat a pair of tall round-headed windows under a small round opening, and below them a round-headed doorway reached by a few steps. The long side walls had tall round-arched windows. A cast-iron railing on a dressed stone plinth enclosed a narrow forecourt planted with shrubs, and the street around it was cobbled. Two interior views taken on 20 May 1933, when the building was the city archives, show a galleried hall: a gallery with a geometric fretwork balustrade ran along the sides on square piers, reached by stairs, and tall windows glazed in small diamond panes rose behind it. The east end was closed by a broad arch. Brass chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The seating capacity is unknown, and no photograph of the Torah ark in place was found.

Leben in der Synagoge

The synagogue served a small congregation, counted at 123 people in the year it opened. From its opening in 1854 the religious leader was Salomon Mielziner, who held the official Danish title of 'Jewish priest' and served the community for about 35 years. The Jewish Encyclopedia calls him minister in Aalborg and names him as a brother of Moses Mielziner. The community kept its own burial ground, used from 1810 until 1968; its tombstones carry Hebrew inscriptions that were later translated into Danish by Julius Margolinsky. After Mielziner's long tenure no successor is recorded in the sources found. Services in the synagogue ended in the 1880s: the city archives give 1884 as the last year the Mosaic community used the building, while the JewishGen account says there were no services from 1890. The building then stood without regular use for more than three decades, until it was donated to the municipality in 1924. The city kept the interior fittings, and the 1933 photographs show archive shelving set between the galleries under the old chandeliers.

Zerstörung

On 19 March 1945 the former synagogue, then holding the Aalborg City Archives, was destroyed by explosion and fire. Captions on contemporary photographs in Aalborg Stadsarkiv, taken from the local wartime chronicle 'Vor vej til 5. maj', call the attack a schalburgtage, the name Danes gave to the reprisal bombings carried out by Danish Nazi collaborators in German service, and say the gang that carried it out was led by the informer Frantz Toft. The JewishGen account states that members of the Schalburg Corps, a Danish SS-affiliated collaborationist corps, set the building on fire. According to the chronicle, all the drawings of Aalborg harbour, which the Nazi German authorities had repeatedly tried to obtain, were destroyed with the archive. Photographs from March 1945 show the roof and interior completely burned out, leaving only the brick walls and the front gable standing around a heap of rubble. Who later cleared the shell, and when, is not recorded in the sources found.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

The congregation had already dwindled away before the synagogue was destroyed. Regular services ended in the 1880s and the building passed to the city in 1924, so no congregation was using it in 1945, and the attack destroyed a municipal archive in a former synagogue rather than a working house of prayer. No source read in this research gives the number of Jews living in Aalborg in the 1930s, or records what happened to them during the Nazi German occupation of Denmark. The Schalburg Corps itself took part, alongside the German security police, in the action against Denmark's Jews in October 1943. The Jewish cemetery of Aalborg, opened in 1810, remained in use long after the synagogue closed: about 149 burials are known there, the last on 12 June 1968. Its stones, including that of the founder Aron Jacobsen, have been photographed and their inscriptions translated. Jewish life in the town in the nineteenth century is now presented by the Danish Jewish Museum in a travelling exhibition.

Der Ort heute

The synagogue stood on Gråbrødregade at its corner with Synagogegade in the old centre of Aalborg, behind the houses on Østerå. Both street names survive: Synagogegade is today a short service lane and Gråbrødregade a pedestrian and service street in the city centre. No source found describes a building or structure of the synagogue surviving on the plot, and the 1945 fire left only a roofless shell, so the exact present use of the footprint has not been confirmed. The map pin marks the junction of the two streets as mapped in OpenStreetMap. Fixing the exact plot will need the city's cadastral maps or the 1859 street drawing in Aalborg Stadsarkiv, which marks the synagogue.

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