The Hamburg Temple () was the first permanent Reform synagogue and the first ever to have a Reform prayer rite. It operated in Hamburg (Germany) from 1818 to 1938. On 18 October 1818 the Temple was inaugurated and later twice moved to new edifices, in 1844 and 1931, respectively.
History of the Temple and its congregation
The New Israelite Temple Society (Neuer Israelitischer Tempelverein in Hamburg) was founded on 11 December 1817 and 65 heads of families joined the new congregation. One of the pioneers of the synagogue reform was Israel Jacobson (1768–1828). In 1810 he had founded a prayerhouse, adjacent to the modern school he ran, in Seesen. On 18 October 1818, the anniversary of the Battle of Nations near Leipzig, the members of the New Israelite Temple Society inaugurated their first synagogue in a rented building in the courtyard between Erste Brunnenstraße and Alter Steinweg in Hamburg's Neustadt quarter (New Town).
Dr. together with Dr. Gotthold Salomon were the first spiritual leaders of the Hamburg Temple in 1818. The first members included the notary Meyer Israel Bresselau, Lazarus Gumpel and Ruben Daniel Warburg. Later members included Salomon Heine and Dr. Gabriel Riesser, who was chairman of the New Israelite Temple Society from 1840 to 1843.
The new prayer book employed in the Temple was the first comprehensive Reform liturgy ever composed: it omitted or changed several of the formulas anticipating a return to Zion and restoration of the sacrificial cult in the Jerusalem Temple. These changes – expressing the earliest tenet of the nascent Reform movement, universalised Messianism – evoked a thunderous denunciation from Rabbis across Europe, who condemned the builders of the new synagogue as heretics. The religious service of the Hamburg Temple was disseminated at the 1820 Leipzig Trade Fair, where Jewish businessmen from German states, many other European countries, and the United States met. As a consequence, several Reform communities, including New York and Baltimore, adopted the Hamburg Temple's prayer book, which was read from left to right, as in the Christian world.
The members, mostly Ashkenazim, strived to form an independent Jewish congregation besides Hamburg's two other established Jewish statutory corporations, the Sephardic Heilige Gemeinde der Sephardim Beith Israel (בית ישראל; Holy Congregation of the Sephardim Beit Israel; est. 1652; see also Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg) and the Ashkenazi Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeinde zu Hamburg (DIG, German-Israelite Congregation; est. 1662), however, in 1819 the Senate of Hamburg, then the government of a sovereign independent city-state, declared it would not recognise a potential Reform congregation. Therefore, the New Israelite Temple Society remained a civic association and its members stayed enrolled with the DIG, since one could only quit the DIG by joining another religious corporation. Irreligionism was still a legal impossibility in Hamburg at that time.
With the temple in the Erste Brunnenstraße growing too small in the late 1820s its members applied to build a bigger synagogue. The senate denied the application for a bigger temple in a prominent location, as intended, since this would incite a controversy within the DIG with the other Ashkenazi faithful also demanding a more visible synagogue. In 1835 the Society started another attempt applying for a building licence, but in 1836 Hamburg's building authority recommended to withhold the application until the senate would have decided the request of Hamburg's Jewry for their emancipation, issued in 1834. In 1835 the senate had decided against the Jewish emancipation for the time being, but had founded a commission to further investigate the question.
In 1840 then the New Israelite Temple Society (meanwhile comprising 300 families) insisted to get a building licence. This time then Hamburg's Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Isaac Bernays intervened at the senate in order to make it deny the application. However, the senate granted the licence on 20 April 1841 and the cornerstone was laid on 18 October 1842. Several sites had been bought, thus to allow building the new Temple with a wide forecourt in the courtyard, however, not - unlike the original intention - visible from public streets. Johann Hinrich Klees-Wülbern was commissioned to design the plans for the new temple. The old temple was profaned. The lawyer and notary Gabriel Riesser enforced that the land was registered on the name of the New Israelite Temple Society, till then the senate would register property of Jewish civic association only under names of a natural person.