07/22 Lecture by Linda Wiesner
28 July 2022, 6 p.m.
The Genizah textiles from
Niederzissen
Lecture by Dr Linda Wiesner
In 2011, an extensively
preserved Genizah from the former synagogue in Niederzissen was retrieved. The
Genizot resulted from the religious commandment to no longer merely dispose of
religious writings and objects: in the rural Jewish congregations this led to
the custom of storing these items in the attic of the synagogue. Most of these
storage spaces have been discovered since the 1980s in relatively modern
synagogues, mainly in rural areas of Southern Germany. For the most part, the
finds consist of handwritten and printed texts. Textiles for use in the
synagogue or by the individual are usually minor discoveries. An exception is
the trove from the Genizah of the former synagogue in Niederzissen. The collection of some 300 textile items,
including Torah mantles and curtains,
small prayer shawls and Torah wrappers and binders, thus
represent an extremely rare cultural record of rural German Jewry. The lecture describes the textile finds from this
Genizah and uses a selection of examples to highlight the significance of the
objects as testimonies to the everyday life and culture of rural Judaism in the
German-speaking area. Linda Wiesner read Jewish Studies as well as German, modern
and contemporary history and musicology in Heidelberg, Graz and Dresden. She
addressed the textile relics in Niederzissen in her dissertation, which has
been published by the Universitätsverlag Winter (Heidelberg) under the title »Stoffgeschichten. Kulturhistorische Zeugnisse einer jüdischen Landgemeinde
aus der Genisa in Niederzissen« (Textile stories. The cultural-historical testimony
of a Jewish community from the Genizah in Niederzissen.)