Speech Given by Mayor Max Brauer on the Occasion of the Groundbreaking for the Synagogue at Hohe Weide, November 9, 1958

English Translation
    Speech given by Max Brauer (16'45''), Date of broadcasting: November 9, 1958; Norddeutscher Rundfunk.

    Es­teemed Chief Rabbi, Ex­cel­lency, Ladies and Gen­tle­men, on this day the most painful of all the wounds in­flicted on us here in Ham­burg through the de­struc­tion of houses of prayer dur­ing the years of ter­ror and dark­ness is be­gin­ning to heal. I say “the most painful of all the wounds,” for with the burn­ing of the syn­a­gogues, the wreck­ing and clos­ing of Jew­ish houses of prayer in Ham­burg and Al­tona, some­thing much worse than the de­struc­tion and dam­ag­ing of churches dur­ing the total war waged by Hitler oc­curred. Here, hell rose against God and hu­man­ity in the deep­est time of peace, and demons and fu­ries were un­leashed. What hap­pened here and what fills us with grief and out­rage to this day was the sac­ri­lege against God, to whom all human be­ings owe the light of this world. The mem­ory of this ter­ri­ble time can­not be evoked more pow­er­fully than through the words of Leo Baeck, Chief Rabbi from Berlin, who wrote the fol­low­ing on the 15th an­niver­sary of the No­vem­ber pogrom: “How often have the im­ages of that night on which the great sac­ri­lege, the burn­ing of the Jew­ish houses of prayer, oc­curred, reap­peared be­fore us, whether we wanted it or not? Again we thought to hear, al­though we turned away our ears, the voices that called to us on that night: ‘The syn­a­gogues are burn­ing!’” What is it that was de­stroyed back then? Not only were the Jew­ish houses of prayer de­mol­ished, but with them pil­lars and sup­ports of a human bond one re­lied on col­lapsed. One be­lieved there was one thing that would al­ways join every­one to­gether: a rev­er­ence for the place peo­ple come to so that they may up­lift them­selves to the Eter­nal from the day’s con­stric­tions and hard­ship. To the place where the in­vis­i­ble draws close to them and in­fi­nite si­lence turns to them. Back on that night when one [lost ma­te­r­ial]  in­audi­ble whether one wanted to know or didn’t, hands were laid on this coun­try’s churches as well. On them, too, for the syn­a­gogue his­tor­i­cally and spir­i­tu­ally is the mother of all churches. One and the same cer­tainty seeks to re­veal it­self in both places, and even if the man­ner and path may dif­fer, in the end Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian houses of prayer share an in­di­vis­i­ble fate. And what is done to one is also in­flicted on the other. In its af­ter­math many a day has made this ob­vi­ous in Ger­many, and only those who wanted to be blind saw it nei­ther back then nor later. Some­thing else was de­stroyed at that time: a vivid his­tory that had grown on Ger­man soil and from Ger­man soil and that car­ried within it­self the promise of a fer­tile fu­ture, this was de­stroyed then. The sen­ate of our ven­er­a­ble old Hanseatic city and our state par­lia­ment as well as all cit­i­zens of our city who are of good will are honor bound to con­tribute to the com­ple­tion of the good work that is to be begun with the lay­ing of this foun­da­tion stone. With it we seek to re­store rev­er­ence for the sa­cred. And we are glad that both our gov­ern­ment and state par­lia­ment are able to con­tribute to cre­at­ing the nec­es­sary ma­te­r­ial foun­da­tions for the con­struc­tion of this new house of prayer. At this hour we can­not help but let our thoughts travel back twenty years, back to those years when the Jew­ish com­mu­nity in Ham­burg and Al­tona counted twenty-​six thou­sand souls al­to­gether. It was, as I men­tioned be­fore, a flour­ish­ing com­mu­nity, and the mem­bers of this com­mu­nity were re­spected and good cit­i­zens of our city. They be­longed to all pro­fes­sions. Out­stand­ing mem­bers of their com­mu­nity have earned great merit in the sen­ate and in our gov­ern­ment of­fices. I’d like to men­tion Sen­a­tor Karel Cohn and Privy Coun­sel­lor Lipp­mann. Dis­tin­guished Jew­ish schol­ars were a boon to our uni­ver­sity: philoso­pher [lost ma­te­r­ial]  in­audi­ble Ernst Cas­sirer, art his­to­rian Erwin Panof­sky, pri­vate scholar Aby War­burg or Al­brecht Mendelssohn-​Bartholdy, from the fam­ily of the great mu­si­cian. A fam­ily that, like so many oth­ers of its kind, has de­vel­oped close ties to our city’s in­tel­lec­tual life over sev­eral gen­er­a­tions. Men like Al­bert Ballin and Max War­burg have an ex­cel­lent rep­u­ta­tion in the world, which also in­creased Ham­burg’s renown among mer­chants, ship­ping com­pany own­ers, and fi­nan­cial ex­perts. Among the most flour­ish­ing mem­bers of our mer­chant class, too, there were many Jew­ish names. How­ever, I must not and do not want to for­get all the many oth­ers who were sim­ple cit­i­zens and had made their hap­pi­ness and home here in our midst. One of the men whose name af­fects me par­tic­u­larly strongly has been men­tioned ear­lier by our es­teemed Chief Rabbi. It is the name of our for­mer Chief Rabbi in Al­tona, Rabbi Car­lebach, with whom I felt a par­tic­u­lar per­sonal bond. Today we must bring up the painful ques­tion of what has be­come of all of them. A Jew­ish memo­r­ial out in Ohls­dorf names seven thou­sand dead mem­bers of the com­mu­nity, but many oth­ers who were of Jew­ish ori­gin and were un­will­ing to deny their ori­gin died as well. Today the Jew­ish com­mu­nity counts one thou­sand three hun­dred ninety mem­bers, of whom per­haps about three hun­dred lived in our city be­fore 1933. This tragic de­vel­op­ment is a painful re­minder for us all of that ter­ri­ble time that also drove me from my home town in 1933. Dur­ing the years of my em­i­gra­tion, every time I met some­one in other Eu­ro­pean coun­tries, in the USA or in the Far East who had been saved, my heart felt lighter. Today we send our greet­ings to all these saved ones who once be­longed to us. And we bow in re­spect and sor­row be­fore those slain. When you, ladies and gen­tle­men of the Jew­ish com­mu­nity, after 1945 took on the dif­fi­cult task of re­build­ing your con­gre­ga­tion that had been so trag­i­cally dec­i­mated, you found even more of your friends’ graves in ruins. Every bit of progress in the re­build­ing of your in­sti­tu­tions moved us and also met with great sym­pa­thy in Ham­burg’s city hall. As the crown­ing achieve­ment of all the ef­forts to re­build your con­gre­ga­tion, by which Mr. Harry Gold­stein in par­tic­u­lar has earned great merit, now fol­lows the ground­break­ing of your syn­a­gogue, which will be the heart of your con­gre­ga­tion. You have had to make do with a pro­vi­sional so­lu­tion for a long time, and it was painful to us, too, that this makeshift was in­ad­e­quate. This has now come to an end. Ham­burg re­stores a part of its dig­nity when it al­lies it­self with its Jew­ish fel­low cit­i­zens and the Jew­ish con­gre­ga­tion in order to cre­ate a new, ap­pro­pri­ate house of prayer. May the peace of your faith’s in­vi­o­la­bil­ity, which we all feel close to in shared broth­er­hood and hu­man­ity, in­habit it. No one has ex­pressed the hope for a new be­gin­ning more poignantly and beau­ti­fully than the above-​mentioned Leo Baeck, who had to suf­fer for his faith in the There­sien­stadt camp. He ex­pressed what also moves us in this mo­ment when he wrote: “The last, the de­ci­sive word is that of a hope that lasts. Of gen­uine, true hope, and a Jew may say, of an­cient Jew­ish hope. It speaks from the eter­nal com­mand­ment and from the eter­nal ‘thou shalt’ of God’s word, this hope, at once com­mand­ment and com­fort and con­fi­dence. For this is what it is, a hope last­ing through­out the his­tory of mankind. The human being, each in­di­vid­ual just as the peo­ple as a whole, can and is sup­posed to begin anew at any time. This strength to turn back to­wards God is in­trin­sic to every­one, and the path of the eter­nal opens up be­fore every­one. From de­struc­tion speaks a warn­ing that is also a hope: ‘Pave the way for the eter­nal.’”

    [] Read­ing of the Jew­ish Con­gre­ga­tion char­ter for the ground­break­ing of their syn­a­gogue []

    By lay­ing the foun­da­tion stone for this new syn­a­gogue, we con­se­crate this syn­a­gogue to the last­ing honor and the mem­ory of the dead. A re­minder to the liv­ing and a place for fu­ture gen­er­a­tions that opens the path to true hu­man­ity.

    Source Description

    When the foundation stone of the new synagogue was laid on November 9, 1958, Hamburg’s mayor, Max Brauer, was present to give a speech. Hamburg’s first synagogue of the postwar period was built at Hohe Weide. Previously the small Jewish congregation had to hold prayer services in provisional prayer halls. In his speech, which was about twelve minutes long, Max Brauer commemorated the persecution and murder of Hamburg’s Jewish citizens during National Socialism and honored the efforts made to rebuild Jewish life after 1945. His speech was broadcast on the radio on November 11, 1958 and is in the collection of the NDR sound archive Tonarchiv. According to archive records, the broadcast was produced by the editorial staff of the program “Reportage.” The sound recording includes both Brauer’s speech, which is interrupted by the reading of the founding charter, and a speech given by Rabbi Ludwig Salomonowicz. At the end of the recording, the symbolic groundbreaking by spade and the blessing spoken by the rabbi can be heard.
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    Recommended Citation

    Speech Given by Mayor Max Brauer on the Occasion of the Groundbreaking for the Synagogue at Hohe Weide, November 9, 1958 (translated by Insa Kummer), edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, <https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-146.en.v1> [April 06, 2025].