Chandelier and Goodbye @museum.de

For the last object on this tour, please look up, into the roof space of this house.

Above the benches in the Archshofen synagogue hung three elaborately worked chandeliers, which had been presented to the Jewish community by King Karl of Württemberg in 1865. The synagogue had to be abandoned in around 1936, and shortly afterwards, there was no longer a single person of the Jewish faith resident in Archshofen.

Although the synagogue survived the night of the November 1938 pogrom undamaged, the state of the chandeliers gradually deteriorated. Youngsters would take aim at the little cut glass droplets with slingshots. Finally, a single complete chandelier was assembled from what remained of the damaged ones.

For years, that chandelier hung in Archshofen’s Protestant church; today, it can be found in Langenburg Palace, a few kilometers south-west of Creglingen. Here at the museum, the remains of the chandeliers are a reminder of the extinguished Jewish community in Archshofen.

Creglingen, Craintal, Archshofen – today, evidence is being uncovered and memories are being preserved in several of our town’s neighborhoods. Now that you’ve explored our museum, there’s the option of visiting the two other sites that commemorate Jewish life. Since 2005, the room at the Old Town Hall where those 16 Jewish men were incarcerated, humiliated and beaten with steel rods on March 25, 1933, has become a memorial site. It’s an impressive spatial installation and not to be missed. You can request a key to the memorial site here at the museum – it’s just a few minutes’ walk.

To drive to the Jewish Cemetery, you should take the route out of town via Torstrasse and Streichentaler Strasse, and then turn right at the sign to “Bauunternehmung Wengertsmann”. The key can be obtained at the Creglingen municipal office or, if it’s a Sunday, here at the museum between 2 and 5 p.m.

Thank you for listening – we hope you’ve enjoyed your time with us. We’re a non-profit, so if you want to support our work, a donation is very welcome; you’ll find a donation box by the exit. For larger donations, remittance slips are available. We’ll be happy to provide a donation receipt on request. Tax-deductible U.S. contributions can be made via the Obermayer foundation.

To find out more about the museum’s international circle of friends, about events and special exhibitions, please go to our website: jüdisches dash museum dash Creglingen dot de.

We’d love to welcome you to our museum again, maybe to one of our events. If you give us your name and email address, we’ll keep you updated.

For today, we’ll just say thank you, and Auf Wiedersehen!