Peckelsheim

First Jewish presence: 1650; peak Jewish population: 147 in 1888; Jewish population in 1933: unknown (11 in 1932)

By 1802, 131 Jews had settled in Peckelsheim (12 % of the total population). The community built a small synagogue on a private site in the 1780s, and continued to grow despite the anti-Jewish disturbances of the spring of 1848. The cemetery was consecrated in the 1800s; its oldest extant tombstone is dated 1846. Many Peckelsheim Jews were dealers in local produce. The community inaugurated a new synagogue in 1861. Schoolrooms were added to it in 1929; however, Jews were already leaving the town by then, a trend that accelerated after the anti-Jewish boycotts of 1933 and the resulting discontinuation of synagogue services. On Pogrom Night, rioters desecrated the cemetery and pushed over the tombstones. The interior of the defunct synagogue (which had been preserved) was destroyed, but the structure was left intact and later used for secular purposes: as a school, a warehouse, and, finally, as an apartment block to which a memorial plaque was affixed in 1950. The few Jews who still lived in the town after Pogrom Night were presumably deported, but we do not have information about their fate.

Harold Slutzkin

Copyright: Pogrom Night 1938 - A Memorial to the Destroyed Synagogues of Germany/ Germansynagogues.com

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