The Merry Beer City Dortmund
Dortmund’s impressive new synagogue was inaugurated in 1900. The organ manufacturer Walcker, who dominated the market in the region, installed a substantial organ above the ark. For many years, the synagogue and the city’s most prominent Protestant church, St Reinoldi (where a huge Walcker organ was inaugurated in 1909), organized joint series of alternating organ concerts. To demonstrate their ideological commitment the authorities of Dortmund initiated the destruction of the principal synagogue in the city prior to the November Pogrom of 1938. Demolition work began on 3 October 1938, two weeks later the main structure was blown up, and by the end of the year all traces of the synagogue had disappeared. The Jewish community sold the organ to the Catholic St Gertrudis church in the north of the city where it was badly damaged during a bombing raid. Some of its components were subsequently stolen and the console and remaining pipes stored in the church until 1958, when the Lübeck-based organ manufacturer Kemper began with the construction of a new organ. He granted the congregation a rebate of 3,000 DM for the scrap material, which he presumably recycled. Today, the city’s municipal theatre stands in the location of the destroyed synagogue.
Published by Cramers Kunstanstalt, Dortmund. Posted on 8 March 1933.
Postcard from the book: Jews in Old Postcards and Prints