Hainsfarth

Hainsfarth is a municipality in the district of Donau-Ries in Bavaria in Germany.From as early as the 13th century until 1941, Hainsfarth was home to a sometimes large Jewish community, accounting for up to 40 percent of the village's population in 1810. From 1710 to 1938 the village also had a functioning synagogue, which was partly destroyed by the Nazis but renovated and reopened in 1996. The village also has an intact Jewish cemetery, which was desecrated during the Nazi era but also restored.Jewish communityHistoryThe oldest surviving record of Hainsfarth's Jewish history dates back to 1434, when the burial of a Jew from the village at the Jewish cemetery at Nördlingen was recorded. By 1480, four Jewish households are mentioned at Hainsfarth. In the late 16th century, this number may have fallen as low as three Jewish citizens living in the village, but it soon rose again to between seven and ten households. From 1741, Jews were arriving in Hainsfarth from Palatinate-Neuburg, where they had been evicted.The Jewish community did not have its own rabbi but was looked after by the rabbi of either Oettingen or Schwabach, at the end of the 19th century primarily the latter. The community was concentrated along the Judengasse, now the Jurastraße.By 1810 the village had a population of 1,142, of whom 452 were Jewish, almost 40 percent. After that, the number and percentage of Jews in Hainsfarth steadily declined. In 1871, when Bavaria became part of the German Empire, there were still 232 Jews in the village, but by 1910 there were only 91.