Jewish Records of Fürth (and its area)

Posted on September 17, 2011 by admin

The Fürht Jewish Museum (by: wikimedia commons - Magnus Gertkemper)

Recently someone asked via the gersig newsgroup (on Wed, 27 Jul 2011 03:43:05 -0400) about the availability of Jewish birth records from 1862 in Fürth (Bavaria). Another member’s reply was that there are dozens of postage stamp sized books for Fuerth vital registers at the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem (CAHJP).

She continued to explain that

[…]”The books are painful to research and can only be read with a magnifying glass, and even then sometimes they are illegible because their sewn binding gets into the actual record and because much of the writing is very sloppy.”[…]

and

[…]”It is my understanding that in Germany, they have blown up these miniatures and have more legible records available.
If I am not mistaken, they are located at Detmold, or perhaps that is the place where they enlarged the miniatures. I am sure someone else will chime in with the proper details.”[…]

Which Fürth:
I checked with some Detmold archives but they did not know about microfilmed Jewish Vital Records and secondly, Detmold is in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and not in the state of Bavaria.

The city of Grevenbroich has a district called Fürth (Postal Code 41515). Grevenbroich is in the government district (Regierungsbezirk) of Düsseldorf, which is also the capital city of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Detmold itself is another government district of North Rhine-Westphalia.

The Jewish vital records at the Nürnberg state archives:
The Nürnberg Staatarchiv told me that the Third Reich, more precisely the Reichssippenamt, attempted to seize and collect vital records (births, marriages and deaths) from all Jewish communities.

These Jewish vital records were microfilmed in beginning 1945 by the Gatermann company. The originals were unfortunaelty lost. The files were probably destroyed by water damage while these files were stored in the Rathsfeld castle in Thüringen.

After the War The Gatermann company offered to sell the records of the Bavarian Jewish communities to the State of Bavaria, which did indeed acquire the paper copies of these files.

These paper copies are today at the State Archives of Nürnberg, where all records from the Jewish communities in the Mittelfranconia (Mittelfranken) district are stored (i.e. the Fürth files are also included in these copies).

Likewise can these files be found at the Bavarian Central State Archive in München (Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv in München).

The mentioned Jewish Vital records are in the Nürnberg staatarchiv in reportorium (repository) 515/7 –> Nr. 89 – 124 and it contains the following registers:

  • birthregisters for 1698 to 1877,
  • marriageregisters for 1781 to 1939
  • death registers for 1662 to 1927.

Besides these aforementioned records, the same repository contains:

  • a cemetery register (1890 – 1928)
  • the Memorialbook of the ‘Neusynagoge’ from the 19th century

As said, all these copies are available at the Nürnberg state archives.

The Jewish vital records at familysearch.org:
I am not sure yet if all or part of these files are also microfilmed by the Mormons, the Nürnberg staatarchiv could not confirm this to me as they did not see it in order to compare their copies to the ones from the Mormons. Next thing I did, was to contacting the FamilySearch organisation to find out wether they could tell me if their records are the same as in the Nürnberg Staatarchiv, they could not tell me (yet).
That familysearch  collection has the following properties:

  • Matrikel, 1808-1875
  • authors: Jüdische Gemeinde Nürnberg (BA. Nürnberg), (Main Author)
  • format: Manuscript/On Film
  • language: German
  • publications: Leipzig: Zentralstelle für Genealogie, 1983
  • Salt Lake City, Utah: Gefilmt durch The Genealogical Society of Utah, 1988
  • physical: auf 5 Mikrofilmrollen, 35 mm.

See the link from the website  for more about this collection:
https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/show?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcatalog-search-api%3A8080%2Fwww-catalogapi-webservice%2Fitem%2F360606.

Other usefull sources:
Because I’ve already started to discuss some of the Jewish Records from Fürth in this post, I tought that I should add the following usefull links as well:

The Jewish registers were started on the basis of the Edict of 1813 and continued until 1861. The lists, orderly compiled by places of residence, arranged in orderly columns and continually numbered, offer an exact survey of the Jewish population of a local or baronial district with legal positions in the registers. The former name is followed by the new civil family name, the place and date of birth, marital status (in some cases it includes the number of people in a family) and the current occupation. Therefore, the registers do not only offer a deep insight into the social and economical situation of the Jewish part of the population, but also provide a fundamental intersection for research of their genealogical roots.

For more information on how to get ia copy of this CD-rom, you may refer to http://www.gda.bayern.de/publikationen/judenmatrikel/geleitwort.htm.

and another source is the:

  • Jüdische Fürther which is a website owned by Mrs.Gisela Naomi Blume.
    The website contains lots of information with a register of the Jewish cemetery, Jewish victims of the holocaust, a memory book, etc.
    The link to this great source is http://www.juedische-fuerther.de.

General overview of the different records on Fürth (and its area):
[note when using the table from below: Left-side pages (l. S.) are filmed separately from right-side pages (r. S.) and sometimes in reverse order (rückw.)]
[table “22” not found /]

I’ll be glad if visitors of this website will send me updates if they find any issues with the information on this page.

Links and sources:
Jewish Fürth:

Archives:

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