On the Jewish calendar, today is the first day of the month of Kislev, which the Orthodox rabbi of Munich, Heinrich Ehrentreu, decreed 100 years ago should be observed by local Jews as a day of fasting and prayer. The decree was observed by his community for the next ten years, to commemorate what he described as “the prevention of a pogrom.” Michael Brenner investigates the events Ehrentreu had in mind, which began with Adolf Hitler’s attempt to overthrow the German government, launched from a Munich beerhall on November 8, 1923:
“All along the Ring, [a central street], they were picking up all Jewish men. We had been spared. And all were told: ‘Tomorrow you’ll all be hanging, the entire Jewish community,’” recalled the Jewish physician and mother Rahel Straus.
The attorney Philipp Löwenfeld escaped that night’s terror by the skin of his teeth, when an acquaintance rang him up at his office half an hour before midnight to tell him that he was in personal danger and should go into hiding. There were “already Jewish hostages [who had been] arrested in large numbers,” he later remembered. The Jewish hostages were threatened with being shot until the Bavarian state police finally came by to free them. Some of them had received a bloody beating.
Members of the right-wing organizations scoured Munich’s directory of addresses for Jewish-sounding names or looked for them next to doorbells. The rabbi of the Jewish community, Leo Baerwald, was hauled out of his home at night, taken to a field outside the city, tied to a tree, and threatened with being shot.
The government successfully suppressed the uprising before the shooting began. But the relief would prove only temporary.
Read more on Moment: https://momentmag.com/putsch-pogrom-1923-brenner/