Jews in Leipzig - The University of Texas at Austin

since the community had been founded by German-born Reform Jews, foreign-born
orthodox Jews were obliged to pay taxes to support a temple and a style of worship they
did not endorse. 24 It would be some time before an Orthodox temple was founded, and
some time later before it gained support from the Gemeinde.
“Germans” and “Foreigners”
The wave of immigration in the 19 th century, and the resulting demographic facts
of life defined the Jewish community in Leipzig right up to the beginning of the Nazi
period. The essential and continuing division within the community was between
“Germans” and “foreigners”, those whose families had been resident in Leipzig for
several generations and those who had come from abroad, and whose numbers were
greatly increased in the great wave of “Ostjuden”. Leipzig was by no means unique in
this conflict but was unusual in the relative makeup of the community. Like all Jews in
German cities, Leipzigers dealt with the divisions between assimilation and particularism,
secularism and public religiosity, Reform and Orthodoxy. What set Leipzig apart was the
ratio of foreign-born to German-born Jews: by 1925, 68% of the Jewish population of
Leipzig was foreign-born. 25 In comparison, 19.6% of the Jewish population of Frankfurt
was foreign-born, 10.9% in Königsberg, 8.6% in Breslau. Saxony as a whole had a
foreign-born Jewish population much smaller in proportion than Leipzig did, only
22.2%. 26 This made Leipzig unique among mid-sized German Jewish communities.
Only Berlin had a similar ratio.
24 Held, Schalom, 33-34.
25 Höppner and Jahn, 9.
26 Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 1918-1933. Hamburg, 1986. 76.
19