There are not too many stories about the Jewish life in Coppenbrügge, a small village situated near Hannover and Hameln, in Niedersachsen, Germany. The community was always small, with around 50 Jews living here at the beginning of the 19th century.
The presence of Jews here is first mentioned in 1630. For the holidays and the Shabbat, the services were offered as far as Hameln, made famous by Brothers Grimm Pied Pipper of Hamelin.
The few Jewish families living here were active in small businesses, such as the Levy family, which owned a textile factory. Oskar Levy was member in the local hunting and war veterans associations, from whom he was dismissed shortly after the Nazi come to power.
But the Nazi were not having enough humiliating and killing innocent people, they had their feud with the dead Jews too, as they destroyed the local cemetery where 60 people were laid to rest. The cemetery was open since 1787, for the Jews living in the communities of Coppenbrügge, Brünninghausen and Hohnsen.
After the war, the plot that used to be a cemetery was purchased by a private person and was returned back to the Jewish community only in 1988. There are no information about Jews living now an open Jewish life in Coppenbrügge. The area of the former cemetery is marked with a fence, with a modest memorial for the Jews murdered.
An informative billboard has an outline of the circumstances that lead to the destruction of the Jewish life in Coppenbrügge, mentioning the name of the former Jewish residents murdered: Erich Levy, Lieschen Levy, Oskar Levy, Ruth Levy, Ernst Rothstein, Bertha Spiegel. May their memory be a blessing and the name of their murderers for ever erased!
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