Judenstraße, the synagogue quarter and the city around the family
Jews of Halberstadt
A community repeatedly rebuilt
Judenstraße carried memory before the store opened
The Reichenbachs opened their clothing house in a city where Jewish families had worshipped, traded, studied and begun again for centuries. Their streets belonged to a much older community.
Jewish presence is documented in 1261. Expulsions in the late Middle Ages and early modern period were followed by returns. In 1669 soldiers and a mob demolished the synagogue on Judenstraße. The community won compensation in court, but permission to rebuild was still withheld.
Precarious rights and the determination to begin again shaped Halberstadt long before Jacob Reichenbach’s business opened.
Lilly Cohn · born in Halberstadt in 1928
Another household remembers the same city.
Lillyan Rosenberg’s USHMM oral history preserves a child’s memories of Orthodox family life, a linen factory and store, the November pogrom, her father’s imprisonment at Buchenwald, Kindertransport and survival abroad.
Her family is not presented as a documented Reichenbach branch. The testimony widens the view from one household to a contemporary Jewish child who knew Halberstadt before persecution tore her family apart.
A city held close in paint and print
The Halberstadt they kept
Dolf and Mutti loved the look and feeling of Halberstadt. A signed Walter Gemm painting from 1926 and the family's prints preserve the streets, markets and close-built houses they remembered.
Ten of the twelve portfolio prints are now shown, including two newly photographed views: Judenstraße and Hinter dem Richthaus. Together with the painting, they show how deeply the family remained attached to the city.
See the pictures and the story they carryBerend Lehmann and the quarter
A center of learning, worship and trade
Issachar Berend Lehmann supported a Klaus, helped finance the printing of the Babylonian Talmud, and backed the synagogue inaugurated in 1712. Around it grew schools, a ritual bath, houses, commerce, charity and scholarship.
Halberstadt later produced both Israel Jacobson, a pioneer of Reform Judaism, and Esriel Hildesheimer, a formative figure in modern Orthodoxy. The town’s Jewish life resists any single label.
A vanished sanctuary
The synagogue can still be entered through its images.
The surviving visual record is unusually rich. A photograph shows the building nested inside the Bakenstraße block; another preserves the sanctuary’s Baroque arrangement. Käthe Lipke’s watercolor supplies what black-and-white photography cannot: a measured impression of its color.
Open any image for its source and rights.
Open historical sources
A city of competing Jewish modernities
Halberstadt produced figures associated with both early Reform Judaism and modern Orthodoxy. Rabbi Benjamin Hirsch Auerbach also preserved the community’s own documentary history. The source and rights record remains attached to every image.
Read “Halberstadt” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (1904), pp. 164–166 ↗
What can still be walked
The Klaus, mikveh, cemetery and empty synagogue ground
The Jewish quarter is more than the site of a destroyed synagogue. The Klaus and mikveh keep the places of study and ritual visible. The cemetery holds generations of names; the synagogue footprint leaves absence underfoot.
The Halberstadt reading room
Begin with the town. Then follow the evidence outward.
This selection is drawn from the archive’s August 2026 contextual study. It combines an accessible family-and-community history, documentary reference works, a near-contemporary encyclopedia entry and modern scholarship. Links open the work itself or the most useful catalogue record.
The Jews of Halberstadt: A Community History in European Context, 1261–2026
Prepared for the Reichenbach Family Archive in August 2026, this expanded edition brings together the full contextual history, nineteen locally hosted and credited illustrations, a chronology, research guide, figure-licence appendix and bibliography. It is a sourced interpretive overview—not a primary document—and leads readers into the specialist works below.
Full study edition →The Jewish Encyclopedia: “Halberstadt”
Gotthard Deutsch and B. Auerbach, vol. 6, God–Istria (1904), pp. 164–166. A near-contemporary account of the community through 1903, best read as both reference work and period document.
Start here · German · 328 pagesSabine Klamroth, “Erst wenn der Mond bei Seckbachs steht”
Juden im alten Halberstadt, 2nd revised edition (Metropol, 2014), ISBN 978-3-86331-208-4. An accessible, locally grounded history built around families, streets and everyday life.
Documentary reference · German · 6 volumesWerner Hartmann, ed., Juden in Halberstadt
Geschichte, Ende und Spuren einer ausgelieferten Minderheit (1988–1996). Memorial documentation and deportation lists: indispensable for names, but not designed as a continuous narrative.
Digitized primary source · German · 1866Benjamin Hirsch Auerbach, Geschichte der israelitischen Gemeinde Halberstadt
A serving Halberstadt rabbi’s history of his own congregation. Its appendix preserves letters and documents that might otherwise have been lost.
Open access · modern scholarshipPhilipp Graf, Ausgeschlagenes Erbe
Die jüdische Geschichte Halberstadts in der DDR (2025). The essential study of what happened to the city’s Jewish history and memory after 1945.
Interactive · museum-authored · English and GermanDigital tour of Jewish Halberstadt
The Berend Lehmann Museum’s place-by-place guide to the Klaus, mikveh, synagogue site, cemeteries and surviving Jewish quarter.
Quick orientation · follow the footnotesWikipedia: Halberstadt
A useful first map of the city’s chronology, synagogue, Jewish cemeteries and 1945 destruction. Use its linked references to continue into specialist sources.
Digitized books, manuscripts and archival recordsNational Library of Israel: Halberstadt collections
A research portal for communal administration, family tables, statutes, manuscripts, photographs and books connected with Jewish Halberstadt.
Institutional research · ongoingBerend Lehmann Museum research
Current work on Halberstadt family histories, the three Jewish cemeteries and the lost inventory of the Baroque synagogue.
For a wider German-Jewish frame, the archive’s study especially recommends Michael A. Meyer’s four-volume German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Mordechai Breuer’s Modernity Within Tradition, and David Sorkin’s The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840.
Commerce and citizenship
A Jewish family business could be deeply German, visibly Jewish and fully of its town.
No surviving source describes how the Reichenbach household observed Judaism. City, communal and family records still reveal the public and Jewish worlds around them.
The November pogrom in a city file
Violence became administration.
The synagogue inaugurated in 1712 was desecrated and looted on 9–10 November 1938. It was spared burning only because flames would have threatened the surrounding half-timbered houses. On 18 November the building police ordered its demolition; work began the following day, and the Jewish community was forced to pay.
The file continued through 29 June 1939, recording the dismantling and reuse of the building’s materials.
Abrissakte · demolition file
The order’s own words
„… dass das Gebäude in seinem heutigen Zustand eine Gefahr für die öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung bedeutet.“
“…that the building in its present condition constitutes a danger to public safety and order.”
The order treated the ruin produced by anti-Jewish violence as a building-police problem. It also complained—226 years after the synagogue’s dedication—that the structure had been placed in the narrow block “without consideration” and deprived the neighborhood of “air and light.”
Two surviving aftermath views
The order can be read beside what it did.
One small photograph shows the looted sanctuary; the other shows workers dismantling the exposed roof. Their exact item signatures and photographers remain unresolved, so the site presents the low-resolution research copies without enlargement and states that limitation in each record.
The photographs are evidence of this building, not generic illustrations of the November pogrom. Their source link leads back to the museum’s DenkOrt history while item-level citation work continues.
Destruction and what remains
The synagogue was plundered; its Torah scrolls were destroyed or remain missing.
The surviving vestibule wall, Klaus, mikveh house, cemetery, synagogue footprint and memorials form a landscape of memory. The family archive adds private photographs, business objects and letters to those public traces. It lets visitors move between the history of a town and the evidence of one household.