Speyer Hosts First Jewish Wedding in 70 Years
Many German citizens — at least the royal wedding watchers among them — will be caught up in the festivities this weekend of the marriage of two descendents of royal families. Georg Friedrich Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, and Sophie Johanna Maria, Princess of Isenburg (who are really just private German citizens since the country’s aristocracy was stripped of their titles way back in 1919), will be saying their “I do’s” on the grounds of a former royal palace in Potsdam.
Meanwhile, another notable wedding has taken place recently in the German town of Speyer. There was no royalty involved, but the event did have historic importance. For the first time in 70 years, a Jewish simcha — in this case, a wedding — took place in the ancient city.
Chabad reports that one of its rabbis, Rabbi Menachem Gurewitz, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Offenbach am Main, conducted a wedding ceremony for two Jewish students beside Speyer’s ancient synagogue and mikveh.
Speyer is located along the Rhine, and was one of the three great centers of learning in the Medieval Ashkenazic community. The other two centers were in Worms and Mainz. By 1933, there were only 269 Jews living in Speyer, and most of them were killed in the Holocaust. A Jewish community in the city was reconstituted only in 1996, when a small number of Jews immigrated to there from Eastern Europe.
Following the wedding, a curator of the local Jewish museum reportedly remarked that from now on, he “no longer needs to describe dead stones, but a place where Jewish life is starting to reemerge.”
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
