Legal Commentary

The following comes from John Q. Barrett's (St. Johns) excellent Jackson List, dedicated to the work of Justice (and Nuremberg Prosecutor) Robert Jackson (Barrett is writing a biography of Jackson). I found it a very affecting story.

To all our Prawfs readers and writers, celebrating, Happy New Year.

In the Hebrew year 5705, Erev Rosh Hashanah, the eve of the Jewish New Year, came at sundown on the 29th day of the month of Elul. On the Gregorian calendar, it was Friday evening, September 7, 1945.

In Allied-occupied former Germany that year, four months after Nazi Germany?s unconditional surrender, few synagogues were standing and functional, of course. In the Bavarian city of Fürth, however, the space that once had been the synagogue had survived. It was a ground floor room, built to hold 100 or so worshippers, in a big, four-story stone building that once had been a Jewish orphanage. During the Nazi period, the synagogue and orphanage, like virtually every Jewish space, facility and business in Germany, were closed. Other Germans used the upper floor rooms and turned the former synagogue space into a warehouse.

In late summer 1945, about two weeks before Rosh Hashanah, the United States Army, the occupying power in the region, returned this building to the Jews of Fürth. They?survivors who had returned?numbered only 30 or 40, out of 3,000 Jews who had lived in Fürth before the Nazis and the war. These survivors cleaned up and reconsecrated the nearby Jewish cemetery. (Allegedly, some knowledgeable persons dug up there the congregation?s Torah scrolls, which had been buried in the cemetery and thus saved during the war. Others say today that the Torahs of Fürth were saved in hiding places beneath the synagogue?s floor.) The survivors also cleaned and reconsecrated their synagogue, bringing it back to life by relighting the eternal candle (nair tamid), rehanging embroidered drapes on the holy ark (oron chodesh), and restoring other fixtures.

On that Erev Rosh Hashanah, services in the Fürth synagogue were overfilled. The worshippers included returned congregants, American soldiers and ?displaced persons? who were living nearby.

Fürth is located just a few miles from Nürnberg. In that same month of September 1945, work crews, including German prisoners of war in U.S. Army custody, worked at the courthouse, the Palace of Justice, located on Fürtherstrasse between the two cities. They prepared that facility for the International Military Tribunal proceedings?the Nuremberg trial of the principal Nazi war criminals?that would begin that November in Courtroom 600.

For Jews on Justice Jackson?s United States prosecutorial team during 5706, the Fürth synagogue became their congregation.