La storia di Brummen Synagogue
Brummen is a village in the Gelderland district of the IJssel valley, between Zutphen and Arnhem. Jews lived in and around it from the eighteenth century, and by 1809 there were 48 of them. For most of the nineteenth century they prayed in a room in a private house; regular services there are recorded from 1818, and in 1859 the central Jewish consistory recognised Brummen as a Bijkerk, a dependent congregation. Only in 1889 did the community acquire a purpose-built synagogue, consecrated in August of that year on the corner of what are now Tuinstraat and Primulastraat; the photograph caption of the Regional Archive Zutphen gives the address as Tuinstraat 49, formerly Krulstraat.
The building had a short religious life. The community never exceeded about forty members in this period, and the archive caption states that the last services were held in 1902. In 1916 the members voted to sell the building, and in 1917 the congregation dissolved itself and joined that of Zutphen. The former synagogue then had several other uses, the last of them as a public bathhouse from 1950, until it was pulled down in 1962. A memorial stone now stands on the site.
Where it stood for 73 years
Historic: Krulstraat, later Tuinstraat 49, corner of Primulastraat, Brummen, Gelderland. Today: corner of Tuinstraat and Primulastraat, 6971 Brummen, where a memorial stone stands on the site (approximate to the plot, exact to the corner).
Apri la mappa grande →La comunità ebraica
The first Jew recorded in the area settled at Bronkhorst near Brummen in 1727 under a letter of protection, paying a quarterly tax. The community stayed small throughout its existence. The figures for Brummen and its surroundings are 48 Jews in 1809, 41 in 1840, 42 in 1869 and 40 in 1899, falling to 18 by 1930. Its members earned their living in trade, in the textile business, as butchers and as farmers, and one ran a café. Religious services were held from 1818 in a house synagogue, and from 1859 Brummen had official standing as a Bijkerk, a branch congregation without full independence. A Jewish cemetery at the Manenveld was in use from 1811, and there was also a Jewish cemetery at Bronkhorst, whose small purification house was bought and restored by the municipality of Steenderen in 1980. No rabbi, teacher, cantor or board member of the Brummen congregation is named in the sources read.
Architettura e design
One photograph of the building is known from this research, in the Brummen photo collection assembled by W. Reusink at the Regional Archive Zutphen. It shows a modest free-standing hall of dark brick with a steep pitched roof and a chimney at the ridge. The street front is a single gable. Its raking edges are outlined by a stepped band of small brick arches, a decorative corbel table that runs up both sides to the apex, where a small round opening sits beneath the peak. At the centre of the front is a tall round-arched window whose upper part holds a large six-pointed Star of David in the glazing, and beneath it a rectangular double door with small panes. On either side are two round-arched windows, one above the other, those on the lower level with round panes in their heads. A side wing or neighbouring building adjoins on the left. The architect, the builder, the cost, the seating capacity and the arrangement of the interior are unknown.
La vita nella sinagoga
Almost nothing is recorded about worship in the 1889 building. It replaced the house synagogue in which the congregation had prayed since 1818, and it served a Bijkerk of roughly forty people, so services would have depended on assembling a quorum of ten men from Brummen and the surrounding hamlets. The archive caption states that the last services were held in 1902, only thirteen years after the consecration, which suggests that the community could no longer sustain regular worship once families moved away to the towns. The congregation nevertheless kept its formal existence for another fifteen years: it was the members' meeting of 1916 that decided to sell the building, and in 1917 the Brummen community voluntarily dissolved and merged with the Jewish community of Zutphen, about ten kilometres to the north-east. From then on the Jews of Brummen belonged to the Zutphen congregation and would have attended its synagogue. Names of the people who led prayers or kept the building are unknown.
Distruzione
The building had ceased to be a synagogue long before the Second World War. After the 1916 decision to sell it, it passed out of Jewish hands; the buyer is not named in the sources read. According to the Regional Archive Zutphen it then had several different uses, and from 1950 until its demolition it served as a bathhouse, a public bathing facility of the kind many Dutch villages kept in the years before most houses had their own bathroom. No source read mentions damage or looting during the Nazi German occupation, when the building was no longer a place of worship. The former synagogue was demolished in 1962, according to both the Jewish Cultural Quarter community entry and the archive caption. Who owned it at that time and who ordered or carried out the demolition is not recorded in the sources found; whether the bathhouse was run by the municipality, which might point to a municipal demolition, could not be confirmed.
Il destino della comunità
By the time of the German invasion in May 1940 the Brummen congregation had been merged into Zutphen for more than two decades, and in 1930 only 18 Jews were counted in Brummen and its surroundings. Under the Nazi German occupation they shared the fate of Dutch Jewry. The Digital Jewish Monument records, for example, the Meijers family of Leuvenheim near Brummen, registered at Zutphenseweg 88 in February 1941: Mozes Meijers, his wife Aaltje Meijers-Levie and their children were murdered in 1943 and 1945, the daughter Jutha Mariana Meijers at Sobibor on 14 May 1943 at the age of 23. Others born in Brummen had moved elsewhere before the war; Mina Weijel, born in the village in 1879, was deported from Enschede and murdered at Auschwitz on 12 October 1942. The total number of Jews from Brummen who were murdered and of those who survived was not established in this research. No Jewish community was re-formed in Brummen after the war.
Il luogo oggi
The synagogue stood on the corner of Tuinstraat and Primulastraat in the village centre of Brummen, at the address given in the archive as Tuinstraat 49, formerly Krulstraat. Nothing of the building survives above ground. In 1988 a memorial stone to the Jews of Brummen and the surrounding area murdered by the Nazis was unveiled on the site of the synagogue. The map pin marks this memorial at the corner of the two streets, as located by a war-memorial database, and the junction position agrees with the street geometry in OpenStreetMap. What occupies the rest of the former plot today was not established.
Hai qualcosa da condividere?
Fotografie, documenti, storie di famiglia o ricordi di questa sinagoga e della sua comunità aiutano a mantenerne viva la storia.
- Brummen (Joodse gemeenten)
- Brummen (Jewish communities, English version)
- Synagoge Tuinstraat 49 (vroeger Krulstraat), photograph 2090_0005_0062
- Synagoge Tuinstraat 49 (vroeger Krulstraat) (Europeana record)
- Joods Monument Brummen
- Tuinstraat and Primulastraat, Brummen (OpenStreetMap ways 6824800 and 6824538)
- Jutha Mariana Meijers
- Mina Weijel
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