Greetings from Cologne

Greetings from Cologne. Königsplatz with the New Synagogue. Another copy of this postcard was posted in 1900.

Between the 1860s and the turn of the century, the membership of the Jewish congregation in Cologne roughly quadrupled, soon rendering the synagogue on Glockengasse inaugurated in 1861 too small. Construction of the substantially larger New Synagogue on Königsplatz began in 1895. It was inaugurated in 1899 by the congregation’s Dutch-born Rabbi Abraham Frank (1838–1917) who had come to Cologne in 1875, having previously served a number of Austrian congregations. Conservative by inclination, he sought to moderate between the reform-oriented majority of the congregation and their more traditionalist brethren, placing the Glockengasse synagogue at their disposal. The New Synagogue was set alight and badly damaged in the November Pogrom of 1938 and later hit during a bombing raid. The only of the city’s seven synagogues to survive the Nazi period, at least in part, its reconstruction began in 1957. Since 1959—at the time, the Jewish community had grown to roughly 1,200 members again (at the beginning of 1933 it stood at more than 17,000)—the synagogue has been the gravitational centre of Cologne’s post-war Jewish community.

No publisher is named on this copy of the postcard, but the distinctive two-step cropping of the image was a characteristic feature of the postcards produced by Trenkler & Co. who circulated the same motif with its name and logo. Perhaps this was a bootleg copy.