Historical background
Gertrud von Nivelles
Gertrude of Nivelles (born 626; died 17 March 659), also known as Gertraud, Gertraudt, Gertrude, and Geretrudis, was the abbess of the Augustinian monastery of Nivelles in Belgium and is venerated as a virgin and saint in the Roman Catholic Church.
Gertrude was the daughter of Pepin the Elder and his wife Itta, making her a relative of Charlemagne.
At the age of 14, she entered the abbey in Nivelles founded by her mother.
In the mid-7th century, Gertrude of Nivelles founded the Benedictine Abbey of Karlburg in Lower Franconia.
The abbey was one of the first monasteries in the Main-Franconian region to particularly care for the poor, sick, and infirm.
After the death of her mother, Gertrude served as abbess of the Abbey of Nivelles from 652 until her death.
Gertrude was highly educated and advocated for girls to be able to read the Holy Scriptures.
She raised the Belgian national saint, Saint Gudula of Brussels, in the Nivelles monastery.
She not only cared for the sick but also provided for traveling scholars and craftsmen.
For the Irish itinerant monks she had invited to her monastery, she built a hospital. Gertrude soon became known as the "patroness of the road."
Her feast day in the Roman Catholic Church is 17 March.
Memorial to the Old Synagogue and the Victims of the Holocaust
The old synagogue in Wattenscheid (now part of the city of Bochum) was built between 1827 and 1829.
It was inaugurated in the spring of 1829.
Until 1870, the synagogue was a branch congregation of the Israelite community in Hattingen.
The synagogue was burned down by the Nazis on the morning of 10 November 1938.
From November 1941, all Jews still living in Wattenscheid were forcibly housed in the Jewish primary school.
On 28 April and 11 May 1942, they were deported by train to Eastern Europe and murdered by the Nazis.
In 1990, the city of Bochum installed a memorial plaque on one side of the passage to the Brauhof, which in Hebrew and German script commemorates the destruction of 1938.
"Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us..."
(Lamentations 5:1)
In 2009, a dignified memorial was inaugurated on Nivellesplatz behind the passage.
The names of all 87 known Holocaust victims from Wattenscheid were projected onto three glass steles, along with an image of the synagogue in the centre and an exhortation from a poem by Stephan Hermlin:
"Memory must defeat forgetting."
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