The Feldbergschule on the Feldbergplatz is one of those massively forbidding buildings that have survived the onslaughts of bombers and city planners and continue to dominate their surroundings.
Built in 1900, it originally housed the Frauenarbeitsschule (Womens’ Industrial School)and later the Christliche Simultanschule (Christian Interdenominational School) before its current role as an elementary school.
As you’ll frequently find around here, it also housed some natiness.
The gymnasium was used as a collection point for the first dportation of Mainz Jews in March 1942, first to Darmstadt and then to Piaski in Poland. Those who survived hunger and disease in the first months were then later murdered in the Belzec and Sobibor concentration camps.
It’s then quite appropriate that the French military authorities consecrated the hall in 1947 as the first post war synagogue in Mainz, in use until 1952 when a replacement synagogue was built in the Forsterstraße, in turn replaced by the main synagogue in the Hindenburgstrasse