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The first attestation of a Jewish presence in Avignon dates from the fourth century. It is a seal representing a five-branch menorah and bearing the inscription avinionensis. Jewish commercial activity was intense under Avignon’s Popes. The tailor of Gregory XI was a Jew, as was his bookbinder. During the Black Death epidemic in 1348, the community in Avignon was spared popular wrath ...
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The term Provintçia in the Hebrew sources corresponds roughly to Provence and Languedoc. In the history of France’s Jews, this region is notable for the outstanding figures and works that it produced in the Middle Ages and by the unbroken presence of Jews in Comtat Venaissin for 2000 years. A lamp dating from the first century C.E. found near the oppidum at Orgon and kept in the ...
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During the Nazi occupation, this village in the department of Ain was the scene of a raid ordered by Klaus Barbie on 6 April 1944. Forty-four Jewish refugee children and their seven teachers were arrested and deported. Only one survived. (Musée-Mémorial des enfants d’Izieu) exhibits letters and drawings in honor of these victims of Nazi barbarity, who lived in the village for nearly a ...
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The Jewish community in the historical capital of the Gauls and, for historians, capital of the French Resistance, has now regained an undeniable dynamism. There are many notable sites surrounding the , built in 1864, as well as some excellent kosher restaurants. All in all, they make Lyon a very pleasant stop. Event information is available from the Chief Rabbinate. As in many French ...
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Jews lived in Roman Lugdunum but disappeared from Lyon because of the expulsions. It was only under the reign of Louis XV that a community was re-created with immigrants from Comtat Venaissin and Alsace. The region is associated primarily with World War II and the French Resistance. The notorious war criminal Klaus Barbie, who was tried in 1986, was the head of the Lyon Gestapo.
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The Jewish presence in Hegenheim seems to date back at least to the 17th century. 14 Jewish families were counted in 1689. Jewish life developed there, the community growing to more than 400 people on the eve of the French Revolution. One of the largest in Alsace at the time, the number of its faithful declined over time. Thus, in 1936, there were only 36 Jews left in Hegenheim. On the ...
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The Jewish presence in Colmar probably dates from the 13th century. Administrative documents confirm this presence. A synagogue was destroyed in 1279. The community grew, in particular thanks to the arrival of Jews from Rouffach and Mutzig. Thus, in the 14th century, it managed a synagogue, a mikveh, a reception hall and a cemetery. Persecuted during the Black Death, the Jews were readmitted ...
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Traces of the old Jewish community can still be seen in this charming tourist town. On ruelle des Juifs, an arched doorway with an engraving in Hebrew signals the entrance to the old synagogue, dating to 1454. On rue du Général-Gouraud the voussoir of an arch bears the Hebrew date 5456, corresponding to 1696 C.E. In the porch, note the two blessings hands carved in stone with the inscription ...
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The Jewish presence in Rosenwiller dates back at least to the 14th century, a writing by Charles IV, mentioning the Jewish cemetery. A letter dealing with a dispute with a certain Haym de Rosenwlller, addressed to the Strasbourg Magistrate in 1550, was also found. In 1727 the Jews, who had been burying their dead here for nearly four centuries, were granted permission to build a wooden fence ...
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In this suburb of Strasbourg one can see a fine eighteenth-century . A room dedicated to Davis Sintzheim (the first Grand Rabbi of France and director of the Talmudic school in Bischheim between 1786 and 1792) retraces the history of the Jewish community and houses temporary exhibitions. The Jewish presence in Bischheim seems to be very old. Many Jews who worked during the day in Strasbourg ...
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Strasbourg, the regional capital, is also home to the European Parliament, as the flags tell you as soon as you leave the train station. This magnificent city, at the heart of many political, national and religious conflicts over the centuries, offers visitors a wide range of treasures and cultural walks… Jewish history is constantly present here. Is it not said that the rue de la ...
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This small town lying in the shadow of an old abbey once had a very active community. You can still see the birthplaces of its two famous Jewish sons: the painter , who was born here in 1843 and died in Algiers in 1918 and whose work bore witness to Alsace’s rural communities; and , born in 1860, who died in Boulogne-sur-Seine in 1940. , built in 1822 and now unused, can still be ...
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The Jewish presence in Bouxwiller seems to date from the 14th century. The princes of Hanau-Lichtenberg adopted Protestantism and were open-minded towards Judaism and its presence during the Reformation, especially in their capital Bouxwiller. They authorized a yeshiva founded by the patron Seligmann Puttlingen and directed by the Chief Rabbi Wolf bar Jacob. Thus, the number of Jewish ...
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The Jewish presence in Pfaffenhoffen probably dates from the beginning of the 14th century. In 1683 the first synagogue in Pfaffenhoffen was built. However, it was destroyed shortly afterwards. This did not prevent the Jewish community from growing from three families at the turn of the 18th century to sixteen on the eve of the French Revolution. Following the three major wars and the rural ...
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Alsace is rich in Jewish history. In the village of Schirrhoffen, for example, in around 1850, the population of 650 included some 450 Jews. Today, there are over 200 specific sites (synagogues, ritual baths, cemeteries). Unfortunately, though, there are many that visitors cannot see because they are closed, abandoned, or located on private property. Thus, while the small town of (in ...
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Traveling rabbis served the small local communities, made up of several or more families (some ten at Evreux and Lisieux, around two hundred at Le Havre). The only sizable community structure, a small , was built by the Jews themselves after the liberation of France.
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In medieval times there was an intense intellectual life around the synagogue’s Talmudic school in what was called “Le Clos aux Juifs” (the Jews’ Enclosure). Contrary to what its name suggests, the enclosure in question was never a closed space. There were Jews living elsewhere in the town and Christians living in the Clos. All this disappeared in 1306, when the ...
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Jewish life in Normandy was focused around Caen and Rouen. The Jewish community lives in the region since the Roman empire until their expulsion in 1182. During the middle-ages, Normandy was the region of France with the largest Jewish community. Their installation in London was favored by William the Conqueror. Rouen was an important center for judaism and Caen had a synagogue until 1306.
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The Jewish community of Latvia traces its origins to the middle of the fourteenth century. Numbering today some 15000 persons, it developed in the principalities of Kurland and Livonia, territories that have often changed hands. The presence here of Baltic barons contributed to the Germanization of the country and placed the Jews themselves under this cultural influence. The gradual ...
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The Jewish community of Lithuania numbers only some 6000. People It is no more than a shadow of what it once was: until the Shoah, it was a center of the Yiddish-speaking lands. In a sense, everything began here from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when European Judaism's center of gravity shifted from Germany and France to Poland and Belarus. As a reaction to the pietisitic practices ...
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The Republic of Belarus is a state formed of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It has retained, however, close ties to Moscow. Historically, Belarus belonged to Lithuania in the fourteenth century, Poland in the fifteenth, and later the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century. From 1920 to 1939, its western regions (including Grodno and Brest-Litovsk) were integrated within ...
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The visitor to Eastern Europe hoping to discover a rich Jewish architectural heritage must remember that what was once the center of Judaic cultural and religious life in Europe -principally in Lithuania between the eighteenth century and the Shoah- had disappeared beyond ruins and cemeteries. The complete eradication of a Jewish presence, the sworn objective of the Nazis, was conducted with ...
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Serbia and Voivodina form, along with Montenegro, a nation that had been called The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 4 February 2003, when it was renamed Serbia and Montenegro. The Serbian and Voivodinan regions witnessed one of the first implementations of the Final Solution, its Jewish population as brutally martyred by German troops as were Jews in Poland or the Soviet Union. In fact, ...
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In a medieval miniature, Bulgarian Czarina Sara figures beside her husband, Czar Alexander, a two children, Shishman and Tamara. A Jewish queen, Sara of Turvono was obliged to convert to Christianity, adopting the name Theodora. In the fourteenth century such a union shock no one in Constantinople, though it would have been inconceivable to the leaders of Rome.
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There is little evidence of a Jewish presence on the coats of the Black Sea before the arrival of Roman legions in the early second century C.E. Vestiges, coins, and inscriptions preserved in a museum in Bucharest, however, attest to the existence of Jews in the region throughout the first millennium. Near the end of the thirteenth century, the great voyager Benjamin de Tudela had already ...
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Below the bell tower of Prague's Jewish city hall, there are two clock faces. One displays Roman numerals, and the other Hebrew letters. The hands of the first clock revolve in the normal clockwise direction while those of the second turn counterclockwise, following the customary manner of reading Hebrew right to left. Such clocks are rare, and this is the only one of its kind adorning a ...
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The history of Jews in Slovakia -dating from the sixteenth century under the protection of the Hapsburg- intersects that of their fellow believers in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Jews in these three countries experienced the same vicissitudes of discrimination, expulsions, and, in the seventeenth century, the acquisition of some civil rights. Numerous Jews from neighboring Moravia flocked ...
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At the Jewish Museum of Budapest, a replica of a tombstone dating from the third century bears the image of a menorah. This relic attests to nearly 1700 years of Jewish presence in the Carpathian basin, predating that of the Magyar tribes who broke free from the confines of the Ural Mountains during the ninth century. The modern history of Judaism in Hungary goes all the way back to ...
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Jewish settlers had to wait until the death of Austria's Catholic and very anti-Semitic Archduchess Maria Theresa and the ascension of her her tolerant son, Joseph II, to gain the right to establish communities in northern Croatia, which at the time had been Hapsburg territory for nearly three centuries.
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A Slavic land under Germanic rule for many centuries, Slovenia finally gained independence in 1991. The fate of the Jewish population here depended largely over the years on the good will of its princes. Nonetheless, the Jewish presence in the region goes back to antiquity. Archaeological digs have revealed a tomb engraved with a menorah at the Skocjan site, which likely dates back to the ...
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