Adass Jisroel Synagogue, St. Gallen

La comunidad judía

East European Jews began to settle in St. Gallen in the late nineteenth century, many fleeing pogroms, and their numbers grew after 1905 and again after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In 1916 the Jüdisches Jahrbuch für die Schweiz counted 600 to 700 'Ostjuden' in the city who formed their own congregations and associations apart from the established community. The yearbook of 1918/19 credits Chief Rabbi A. J. Kuk, who spent the second year of the First World War in St. Gallen, with persuading the groups Talmud Thora, Minjon-Verein and Agudas Achim to unite; Adass Jisroel was founded from them in 1917 (the yearbook of 1921 and the ETH archive give 25 January, the 1918/19 yearbook 25 February). In 1921 it had 105 members and about 500 souls, against about 300 in the older community. Its board was headed by M. Mirelmann, with A. Hauser, H. Kuschernsohn, A. Kutner, L. Fichmann and B. M. Flaks. It ran a Jewish school of about 100 children, a burial society founded in 1904, a women's association, a Zionist group, the hiking club Blau-Weiss and the sports club Makkabi.

Arquitectura y diseño

Aberle did not build anew: he converted an existing factory building of Einstein & Cie. The 1918/19 yearbook says the congregation wanted 'not a showy building but a modest house of God that makes its effect by its very simplicity'. Inside, the former factory became a prayer hall two storeys high with a women's gallery running round three sides; a schoolroom was fitted into each upper floor and a mikveh into the basement. Photographs of 1918 and about 1952 show a free-standing, rendered building with a steep pedimented gable on the entrance front, framed by corner pilasters and crowned with a small chimney or finial. Two tall round-headed windows flank a round window filled with a Star of David, with smaller windows above in the gable. The entrance has a small portico on two columns with a Hebrew inscription on the lintel, set before an arched door. The long side has a row of tall windows. The capacity is unknown.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

The congregation was East European Orthodox; the yearbook explains that its members had been welcome in the existing Swiss synagogues but never felt fully at home there because of differences of minhag, the customs of prayer. Besides daily and Sabbath services the building housed the community's school: the 1921 yearbook places the Jewish school, with about 100 children, in the synagogue itself, and an ETH archive photograph of 1921 shows a class of the religious school 'Schare Torah' with its owner and head, Rabbi M. Heiselbek. Around 1920 the congregation employed M. Arkin as cantor and teacher, though the post was vacant in 1921. Hans Tobler, who grew up opposite, recalled hearing the rabbi chant on the Sabbath and knowing the Jewish New Year and Sukkot from the building. In March 1936 he found swastikas daubed on the two columns of the entrance portico and the words 'Jude verrecke' written on the landing, at a time when the Nazi 'Deutsches Heim' stood a few hundred steps away.

Destrucción

The synagogue was not damaged by war: Switzerland was neutral and the congregation used the building until 1952. By then most of its members had emigrated to Israel and America, and in 1952 Adass Jisroel merged with the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde. The ETH archive's note on its photographs says that with the merger the synagogue on the Kapellenstrasse was given up, and the remaining East European minyan moved to the community house on the Frongartenstrasse. Two photographs by the St. Gallen photographer Lautenschlager, dated about 1952, record the building in snow 'shortly before the demolition'. Alemannia Judaica's address list gives the demolition as 1952, while the former city archivist Ernst Ziegler writes that services ended in 1952 and the building was demolished in 1953. No source read names who sold the building, who bought it or who carried out the demolition; Alemannia Judaica says only that the plot was rebuilt with a block of flats.

El destino de la comunidad

Adass Jisroel was not destroyed by persecution; it dissolved through emigration and merger. Its members had come as refugees from the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe, and many left St. Gallen in the years after the Second World War for the new State of Israel and for America. Swiss neutrality spared the city's Jews from deportation, but relatives of local families were murdered in the Holocaust, and Alemannia Judaica lists ten people born in or long resident in St. Gallen who perished under the Nazis, among them Berthold Knoller, who died in St. Gallen on 27 June 1945 after liberation from Bergen-Belsen. The city also received Jewish refugees: from 1939 to 1944 it was a centre for preparing refugee children for emigration to Palestine, in 1944 1,386 Hungarian Jews arrived from Bergen-Belsen, and in 1945 1,200 survivors from Theresienstadt. In 1952 the two congregations united as one Jewish community, which had about 100 members in 1969 and about 130 in 2014.

El lugar hoy

The synagogue stood at Kapellenstrasse 3 in the Haldenquartier of St. Gallen, opposite the former Methodist chapel and nearly opposite the house 'Grundstein' at Wassergasse 13. According to Alemannia Judaica the plot was rebuilt with a block of flats after the demolition, and OpenStreetMap today shows an apartment building at Kapellenstrasse 3. Nothing of the synagogue is known to survive on the site, and no marker for it is recorded in the sources read. The older synagogue of 1881 on the Frongartenstrasse, where the merged community still worships, was restored and rededicated in 2004.

Nombres destacados