Jüdisches Museum Franken

The Jewish Franconia Network

For hundreds of years since the Middle Ages, Franconia has been home to Jewish families in well over 300 towns. These communities had their own synagogues, prayer rooms, Talmud study centers and cemeteries. To this day, the rich tradition of Franconian Jewish culture is reflected in a network of Jewish museums and synagogue memorial sites, all of which are presented in this brochure. “The Jewish Franconia Network“ is a project of the Jewish Museum Franconia and is supported by all Franconian districts. With this project, the Jewish Museum Franconia links the museums and synagogue memorials in Franconia and gives them a unified public presence, thus doing justice to the historical development of Franconian Jewish culture and highlighting the rich tradition and special significance of Franconian Jewry in southern Germany. Most of the institutions presented here are architectural monuments that, in their musealized form, may also be understood as witnesses to the Shoah, to the destruction and extermination of European Jewry. They are powerful reminders of the brutal end of Jewish life in Franconia, of the National Socialist expulsion, expropriation, persecution and murder of Jews. Today, there are seven new Jewish communities in Franconia, founded after 1945 in Nuremberg, Fürth, Erlangen, Würzburg, Bamberg, Bayreuth and Hof.

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