Old Synagogue of Faaborg (Klostergade)

The Jewish community

The Jewish community of Faaborg was founded by families from Schleswig and Holstein. Moses Levin had been granted citizenship in 1758, but settlement began in earnest with Lucas Abraham, who came from Schleswig in 1793 and became a town merchant in 1796; his brothers Joseph and Levin Abraham and the husbands of his sisters followed. In 1795 the Jews received leave to buy a burial ground, the oldest Jewish cemetery on Funen, used by Jews from Nyborg, Assens and Odense as well until those towns opened their own in 1825. Census figures show 8 Jews in 1801, 70 in 1818 and between 75 and 77 from 1834 to 1850, the period in which the Klostergade house served as synagogue; they never made up more than about 4 per cent of the town. Most were merchants and traders. Lucas Abraham led the congregation until 1831 and personally carried much of the cost of keeping the synagogue going. Bendix and Moses Wulff, both members, sat on the town council. Common family names were Hertz, Lucas, Meyer, Wallach, Wulff and Levin.

Architecture and design

Very little is recorded about the building. The JewishGen account calls it an old half-timbered house of two storeys, which means a timber-framed structure with infilled walls of the type that still lines many streets in Faaborg's old centre. It was an existing dwelling adapted for worship under the royal permission of 1804, not a purpose-built synagogue, so it had no architect in the usual sense, and the date of the house itself is unknown. The property is given as Klostergade 10-12 in the permission and in Elisabeth Rasmussen's study, which cites the town's cadastral records for plot 109, Klostergade 12; JewishGen names the synagogue house as Klostergade 12 and says the rabbi later lived next door at number 10. How the prayer room was arranged, how many seats it held, whether it had a gallery for women and what the ark looked like are unknown. No photograph or drawing of the house has been found; the surviving images of a Faaborg synagogue show its 1859 successor.

Life inside the synagogue

The house was the centre of a small but observant provincial congregation that worshipped under the authority of the chief rabbi in Copenhagen. Services in Faaborg had begun before 1804 in a private home outside the west gate; moving them to Klostergade gave the community a permanent prayer house in the middle of the town, and the families clustered in the streets around it. For its first ten years the congregation paid rent to the owner, Mrs Ploug; Rasmussen suggests it could not afford to buy the property sooner, although Jews had been allowed to own real estate since 1802. Lucas Abraham, chairman until 1831, took on heavy personal financial obligations to keep the synagogue and community running. The congregation also maintained its own cemetery, where the first burial took place on 25 May 1806. Levin Moses Wallach, later the town's last rabbi, was working as religious teacher and ritual slaughterer from the middle of the century, possibly while the old house was still in use. No record of the services, the officiants or the furnishings of the house was found.

Destruction

By the middle of the nineteenth century the Klostergade house was too small for the congregation of about 70, and it was in such poor repair that the community judged it inadvisable to mend it. In June 1859 the representatives H. Hertz and L. Cohen and the chairman Isach Hartvig appealed to members for contributions to a new synagogue. The town's elected council granted 500 rigsdaler, citing the Jews' share in paying off the debt from the restoration of the parish church, and returned 83 rigsdaler the Jews had wrongly paid in church dues for ten years; voluntary gifts brought in 116 rigsdaler and the council added a further 199. The new synagogue was built in 1859 in the courtyard behind the property. According to JewishGen the old house was torn down in 1859; Rasmussen's study confirms the rebuilding but does not mention the demolition. The congregation owned the house at the time, which makes it likely that it cleared the building for its replacement, but no source states who carried out the demolition. There was no violence involved.

The community’s fate

The congregation that left the Klostergade house moved into its new synagogue, consecrated on 7 September 1860 by Chief Rabbi Abraham Alexander Wolff of Copenhagen. It soon began to shrink. Faaborg had 68 Jews in 1860, 65 in 1870, 31 in 1880, 22 in 1890, about 20 in 1901 and 8 in 1911. Rasmussen links the decline to integration, to emigration to Copenhagen and Germany, and to an economic downturn that hit the town's Jewish merchants after the crisis of 1857 and the fall in trade with the duchies. Levin Moses Wallach, who held the title of priest from 1866 and acted as rabbi, died in 1903. By 1907 there was no longer a minyan; on 1 April 1908 Isidor Levin handed the community's representation to the Mosaic Community in Copenhagen, and on 21 November 1914 the synagogue was sold to the Freemasons, who removed every sign of its former use. The cemetery received its last burial in 1974, and no Jews live in Faaborg today.

The site today

The old house stood on the street front of the property Klostergade 10-12 in the centre of Faaborg, with the 1859 synagogue directly behind it in the former courtyard. That later building survives and has been used by the Freemasons as their lodge since 1914, so the plot is still recognisable even though the original prayer house is gone. What stands today on the street frontage at Klostergade 10 and 12, and whether any part of it reuses the old fabric, was not established in this research. The Jewish cemetery at Svendborgvej and Østerbrogade, overlooking the fjord, is the other surviving trace of the community; about half of its gravestones are preserved.

Notable names