Samuel Freund

Freund served as rabbi in smaller congregations in Czarnikau, and then Ostrowo, where he met and married Minna Feilchenfeld.

[1] Designed by Edwin Oppler of the Hanover school of architecture and completed in 1870, the building was the first large, free-standing synagogue in Germany.

[3] In 1921, Samuel Freund took a leading role in the German Jewish community's response to the anti-Semitic charges of Dietrich Eckart, editor of Auf gut Deutsch.

"Rabbi Freund of Hannover immediately gave him a list of twenty families in his own community who sent three sons into the trenches for three weeks and more.

In 1937, Freund published Ein Vierteljahrtausend Hannoversches Landrabbinat, 1687–1937 : Zur 250 jährigen Wiederkehr seiner Begründung dargestellt, a 20-page pamphlet on the history of, and rationale for, the office.

They viewed emigration to Palestine, and the establishment of a Jewish state there, as the only long-term solution to anti-Semitism and the only way for Jews to truly belong to a nation.

[10] That night, Nazi authorities also arrested the junior rabbi of Hannover, Emil Schorsch, and sent him to Buchenwald concentration camp.

German authorities later presented Freund's office with a bill for 26,000 reichsmarks (the current equivalent of $150,000 US) for the synagogue's demolition and clean-up costs.

[11] Samuel Freund spent the last six months of his life tending to his congregation and trying to secure passage out of Germany for his wife and himself.

Freund's health was poor, and in late June 1939 he died of heart failure, and was buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Strangriede in Hannover.