History Establishment In 1885 Pastor Carl Schlicht of the started to
proselytise among the schismatics and succeeded in forming Evangelical congregations. In 1889 former Templers, Protestant German and Swiss expatriates, and domestic and foreign proselytes established the Evangelical congregation of Jaffa. Johann Georg Kappus sen. (1826–1905) became the first chairman of the congregation, seconded and later followed by his son Johann Georg Kappus jun. (1855–1928).
Sponsorship and pastors until 1914 Among the parishioners were wealthy members such as
Plato von Ustinov and Wilhelm Friedrich Faber (1863–1923), president of the
Deutsche Palästina-Bank, who moved to Jaffa in 1899 when the bank opened its branch there. Ustinov offered the new congregation the hall of his
Hôtel du Parc in Jaffa for services. Starting in 1890 granted Jaffa's Evangelical congregation financial subsidies. The pupils of apostate families had been excluded from the Templer school since 1874. The German government generally co-financed the schools of German language in the Holy Land with about a quarter of their annual budgets since 1880. The Jerusalem's Association and the Lutheran
Evangelical State Church in Württemberg agreed to pay the salary of a professional pastor for the Jaffa congregation. They hired Albert Eugen Schlaich from
Korntal, a theologian and educator. He arrived on 10 March 1897 and stayed at Ustinov's hotel until he and his wife found suitable accommodations. The congregation rented the local chapel of the
London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews for an annual payment of 100
francs of the
Latin Monetary Union for its services. In 1900 ca. 30–40 congregants attended services on Sundays in the chapel of the London Jews Missionary Society. In 1905 Schlaich accused the German
Vice Consul Dr. Eugen Büge (1859–1936) in Jaffa to be breaking consular secrets in return for gifts. So Büge was transferred for disciplinary reasons to
Aleppo, however, the German
Foreign Office urged also Schlaich's transfer, since it considered Schlaich and not Büge to have damaged its reputation abroad. The , the executive board of the Prussian state church, pressurised Jerusalem's Association to release Schlaich from his office in Jaffa, thus he was appointed for another pastorate in Germany. The Jaffa congregation gave Schlaich a farewell on 25 December 1905, and Georg Johannes Egger (1842) thanked Schlaich and his wife for 9 years of successful pastoral work. Between 1906 and 1912 the Jerusalem's Association and Evangelical State Church of Württemberg financed Pastor Wilhelm Georg Albert Zeller. He considered the growing Jewish immigration a threat to the
Gentile German colonists, reporting their fears, that they could be expelled in the end, and thus recommended their emigration to a German, less populated colony in Africa. He was followed by the charismatic pastor Dr. , again supported by Stuttgart-based sponsors.
World War I (1914-1917) After the outbreak of
World War I the
Sublime Porte de facto abolished the personal
exterritoriality and consular jurisdiction for foreigners according to
Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire on 7 September 1914. Many young male parishioners left Jaffa to join the
German Imperial Army. Rabenau accompanied them to serve as
military chaplain. The Prussian
Evangelical Supreme Ecclesiastical Council ordered his return in October. His wife and their two sons moved to Germany for the duration of the war. The Ottoman authorities forced all enemy missionary institutions to close in October 1914 and many missionary pupils then joined the joint Evangelical-Templer school of Jaffa. Until 1916 the Ottoman banknotes had dropped to a ¼, later to of their pre-war rate in mark, which was inflated itself. The war-related scarcity of goods further caused a dearness of most products so Jerusalem's Association had to increase its transfers to the Holy Land.
British rule until 1931 On 17 November 1917 Britons captured Jaffa and most male parishioners of Austrian, German or Ottoman nationality from Jaffa and Sarona, including Rabenau, were interned in
Wilhelma as
enemy nationals. In 1918 the interned men were deported to a camp south of
Gaza, while the parishioners remaining in Jaffa were subjected to strict police control. In August 1918 the internees were relocated to
Sidi Bishr and
Helwan near
Alexandria in
Egypt. With the
Treaty of Versailles becoming effective on 10 January 1920 the Egyptian camps were dissolved and Rabenau became the internees' coordinator of the closedown. Most internees returned to the Holy Land, except of those banned by a British black list, such as D. Dr. Friedrich Jeremias, Provost of Jerusalem. Rabenau went to Germany to reunite with his family, the Britons refused his return to Jaffa in July 1920. In April 1921 the Prussian
Evangelical Supreme Ecclesiastical Council appointed
Gustaf Dalman, formerly head of the
German Protestant Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem as Provost at the
Evangelical Church of the Redeemer until
Albrecht Alt arrived. In April 1926 Jerusalem's Association appointed Ernst Paetzold as auxiliary pastor for Jaffa. In September 1928 he held a lecture at the annual conference of Levantine Protestant pastors titled "Our congregations in their position towards other groups of German culture". By 1930 the German
Jews made up the biggest group of Germans in the Holy Land, however a minority among all Palestinians, the Templers amounted to 1,300, and the remaining 400 Germans were – except of few Catholics (mostly clergy) and few
irreligionists – prevailingly Protestant, among them 160 parishioners (as of 1927) of the Jaffa congregation. In April 1931 Paetzold returned to Germany, and the pastorate remained unstaffed due to financial constraints in the
Great Depression.
Pre-WWII position vs. the Nazis When the
Nazi Party aimed at roughing up with the Protestant church bodies in Germany as of 1932, especially with the constitutional election of
presbyters and
synodals of the old-Prussian church in November 1932, this did not play a role in the Holy Land. However, the newly founded Nazi
Faith Movement of German Christians gained an average of a third of the presbyters and synodals in Germany. After
Adolf Hitler imposed on all German church bodies an unconstitutional reelection of all presbyters and synodals on 23 July 1933, the massive voter participation of Protestant Nazis, who had not shown up for years in services, let alone church elections, caused an extraordinarily high turnout, which yielded the
German Christians a share of 70–80% of the presbyters and synodals, with some exceptions. However, this did not automatically mean the total takeover of the German Christians in all Protestant organisations, since due to the decentral and grassroot organisation of many Protestant groups, the official church bodies had no direct control, this was especially true for missionary endowments such as Jerusalem's Association. In Germany the Protestant opposition first formed among pastors with the
Emergency Covenant of Pastors, founded to fight for pastors discriminated by the
German Christians for their Jewish ancestry. This covenant helped to found the Protestant
Confessing Churches, which paralleled in all destroyed Protestant church bodies the official
German Christian-subjected church bodies, which the Confessing Church considered to be schismatic for their abandonment of the universal sacrament of
baptism. Most pastors in the Holy Land sided with the Confessing Church as also did most members of the executive board of Jerusalem's Association, among them Rabenau, an opponent of Nazism since 1931. Jerusalem's Association appointed pastors, fired or furloughed by Nazi-submissive official church bodies, for congregations in the Holy Land. On October 18–20, 1933 the German Protestant missionary endowments within
Deutscher Evangelischer Missionsbund (DEMB) convened in
Barmen and rejected the attempt to subject the missionary societies – in the course of the pervasive
Gleichschaltung of all civic organisations – to the Nazi-submissive
German Evangelical Church. Jerusalem's Association retained its legal independence, successfully rejected the application of the so-called
Aryan paragraph for its own employees and the new appointment of its executive board with a majority of two thirds for
German Christians. However, the Nazi-submissive
German Christians, holding crucial positions in the bureaucracy of the official Protestant church bodies, found other ways to pressurise the missionary societies. Foreign exchange assigned at non-market rates was exclusively to be disbursed for salaries of German nationals, thus salaries of Palestinian citizens (e.g. Arab Protestants) became very difficult to organise, Jerusalem's Association had to incur debts in
Palestine pounds with Deutsche Palästina-Bank, which again had to be permitted by the Nazi government, which submitted any foreign indebtedness of German legal entities to its agreement as part of its austerity policy. Since missions depended on transferring funds abroad the government rationing of foreign exchange became the means to blackmail their cooperation. Jerusalem's Association gained a certain support within the
German Christian-streamlined old-Prussian
Evangelical Supreme Ecclesiastical Council and the Confessing Church, which both collected and transferred funds for the efforts of Jerusalem's Association. Since February 1934 the new Ecclesiastical Foreign Department (Kirchliches Außenamt) under
German Christian (1894–1967) of the new Nazi-submissive
German Evangelical Church claimed the supervision of German Protestant missions. Heckel also presided the board of trustees of the Evangelical Jerusalem Foundation since 1933. Heckel decided on behalf of the Ecclesiastical Foreign Department to also subsidise salaries of ecclesiastical employees in Jaffa and Haifa earlier paid by Jerusalem's Association alone. To get a ration of foreign exchange Jerusalem's Association needed the consent of the
Evangelical Supreme Ecclesiastical Council, to cause the government rationing office allotting foreign exchange. The Levantine Protestant pastors decided on their annual conference at
Easter 1934 (1 April), to keep their congregations out of the German Nazi
struggle of the churches . The pastors of Jaffa and Haifa anyway reported, that their congregations felt more related to Jerusalem's Association than to the
Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union and its Provostry of Jerusalem. In October 1934 the DEMB convened again in Tübingen, declaring its partisanship with the Confessing Church and its
Barmen declaration of May 1934, however, the actual policy depended – case to case – on the opinion of the respective responsible person. While in Germany ecclesiastical media were banned to report on the struggle of the churches, there was no censorship in
British Palestine. So Provost Ernst Rhein, the responsible editor of the "Gemeindeblatt", let his then
Vicar Georg Weiß (later
deacon in
Nuremberg) report on the German struggle of the churches, openly siding with the Confessing Church, in his article on the occasion of
Harvest Festival (). In February 1935 Rabenau, meanwhile a leading representative of the Confessing Church and opponent of Nazism, resigned from doing the German public relations of Jerusalem's Association. After the
Brethren Council of the old-Prussian
Ecclesiastical Province of Pomerania, the Pomeranian Confessing Church executive, had agreed to release its Vicar Felix Moderow, he moved to Jaffa to serve there as auxiliary pastor from 1935 to 1937. Also Provost Rhein demanded an opponent pastor as his new vicar and chose another Pomeranian theologist,
Fritz Maass (1910–2005), as his vicar in Jerusalem. However, in the German diplomatic service the so-called
Aryan paragraph caused the furlough of
Jerusalem's German Consul-General Dr. in summer 1935, since his Protestant wife Ilse (d. 1988), serving as presbyter of the Jerusalem Evangelical congregation, counted by the Nazi racist categories as partially Jewish. In 1937 Pastor Christian Berg succeeded the retired Detwig von Oertzen in Haifa. Berg had been furloughed by his employer, the
German Christian-streamlined
Evangelical Lutheran State Church of Mecklenburg, after the Nazi government sued him in a political trial in
Schwerin in June 1934. After Moderow's return to Germany in 1937 the retired Oertzen served again as pastor in Jaffa until 1939. In July 1939 Oertzen left Jaffa for a summer holiday in Germany, but also to look after his salary, which had been withheld on a German account, for – in preparation of the war – the rationing office blocked most transfers abroad since early 1939. Jerusalem's Association used
Haavara Ltd. for its transfers to Palestine between 1937 and 1939.
World War II and after With
Germany (September 1) and the
Soviet Union (September 17) invading
Poland in 1939, the
Second World War started, followed by the British internment of most male Jaffa parishioners of German or other enemy nationality as
enemy aliens. In May 1940 all remaining enemy aliens of Jaffa,
Bir Salem, Sarona and Tel Aviv, not yet interned, such as
Gentile Germans, Hungarians, and Italians, were interned in
Wilhelma, which was converted into an internment camp. The remainder was evacuated to Cyprus in April 1948. had sold other real estate and his hospital, which he had built up, to the Templers on 5 March 1869 under the proviso to further cooperate with
Reformed (Calvinist) deaconesses from
Riehen and to provide charitable health care for all, who needed it The physician was Dr. Gottlob Sandel, father of the engineer . In 1882 the Württembergian royal court preacher Dr. , however, defamed Templers in his "Protestantismus und Sekten" (Protestantism and sects) as bearing "the character of the morbidly abnormal." When in March 1897 Pastor Schlaich had arrived in Jaffa, the Templers offered him their fellowship hall for his first accession preach to the Evangelical congregation, and Schlaich accepted However, in October the same year, travelling and fund-raising in Württemberg, Schlaich unveiled that his aim is proselytising among Muslims and Templers, who felt deeply insulted to be mentioned in the same breath with non-Christian Muslims. So William II and Auguste Victoria could not attend it. (right), façades towards Rechov
Auerbach (רחוב אוארבך) German
Emperor William II, his wife
Auguste Victoria, protectress of Jerusalem's Association, and their entourage stayed in Jaffa on 27 October 1898. Their travel agency Thomas Cook accommodated the imperial guests in Ustinov's "Hôtel du Parc", the only establishment in Jaffa regarded suited for them, while the further entourage stayed in
Hotel Jerusalem (then Seestraße, today's Rechov
Auerbach #6; רחוב אוארבך) of the Templer Ernst Hardegg. Thus William II, as (Supreme governor of the Evangelical State Church in Prussia's older Provinces) kept the balance between Templers and Evangelical Protestants at his visit. All German citizens hoped after the visit for an improvement of their treatment by the Ottoman authorities, but in vain, the tiny community of Germans in the Holy Land only played a marginal role in the German-Ottoman relationship, which was not to be obfuscated by quarrelling settlers in the Holy Land. The hospital, founded by Metzler and run since 1869 by Templers and Protestant deaconesses, was financed by a health insurance, which provided for higher contributions by Protestants and lower ones for Templers, who considered themselves as the main providers of the hospital since its purchase in 1869. Generally the revenues of the health insurance also covered the cost caused by poor patients from the general Jaffa population, who were treated even though they could not pay for it. In 1901 the relations between Protestants and Templers had eased so far, that the Protestant contributions were lowered to 20 and 30 francs p.a., before both religious groups paid equal contributions as of 1906 Pastor Zeller, who officiated in Jaffa since 1906, took his efforts to reconcile both groups. The German Foreign Office imposed on Gentile Germans of different denominational affiliations a stronger co-operation under influence of Palestinian Nazi officials of Temple background. • 1890 – it opened its school, its first permanent institution • 1925 – in December 1925 the Evangelical congregations of Jaffa, as well as that of Beirut (est. 1856), Haifa, Jerusalem and Waldheim joined the new umbrella organisation of the
German Federation of Protestant Churches (1922–1933), then led by President Hermann Kappler. • 1940 – with the internment of most of its parishioners in Wilhelma the congregation de facto ceased to exist in 1940. The number of parishioners developed as follows: • 1869: 18 persons • 1889: 50 persons • 1898: 75 persons • 1900: 93 persons • 1901: 104 persons In 1903 parishioners in Jaffa and Haifa amounted to 250 altogether. • 1904: 130 persons • 1913: 136 persons. • 1927: 160 persons In August 1898 Ernst August Voigt, architect of Haifa, handed in his plans for a combined church, community centre, school and pastor's apartment. The belated
firman, permitting the building, finally arrived on 27 October 1898, after attempts of Templers to baffle the planned constructions, however, too late for an imperial attendance in the laying of the cornerstone. , then ''Supreme Governor of the Evangelical Church of Prussia's older Provinces'', and Queen
Auguste Victoria after the inauguration of the
Evangelical Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem (
Reformation Day, 31 October 1898) After Emperor William II's inauguration of the
then Evangelical Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem on
Reformation Day, 31 October 1898, the bulk of the accompanying entourage was determined to return to Jaffa, to get back to their ship. However, a train accident on the
Jaffa–Jerusalem railway, opened in 1892, interrupted their journey, so that they only arrived in Jaffa on November 2. Thus the Protestant dignitaries among them participated in the laying of the cornerstone for the Evangelical church and community centre in Jaffa, among them Dr. (*1832–1901*), Prussian minister of education, cult, culture and medicine, the executive board of Jerusalem's Association, D. (*1831–1903*), president of the
Evangelical Supreme Ecclesiastical Council and
General Superintendents of different ecclesiastical provinces within the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces, representatives of other German and Swiss Protestant
church bodies (Braun for Württemberg), of the Lutheran
Church of Norway and
Church of Sweden as well as of other Protestant churches in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and the US, altogether 45 women and men of the imperial delegation. From the local notables Christoph Hoffmann II (jun.), president of the Temple Society, and representatives of the Evangelical congregations in
Bethlehem in Judea,
Bir Salem, Haifa, and Jerusalem participated in the ceremony. Braun, court preacher of King
William II of Württemberg, held the speech at the ceremony and donated himself 10,000 marks The actual cornerstone included the deed of foundation and seeds of grain and vegetables, symbolising the fertility of the
Sharon plain. The congregation then spent with Braun's consent his donation of 10,000 marks for Heilpern's house (today's Rechov Beer-Hofmann #9), to become the school and
rectory, for the latter of which it also serves today's congregation. However, then the German vice-consulate, still resided in that house and Consul Edmund Schmidt asked to be allowed to further stay there until the new, still-existing vice-consulate in today's Rechov Eilath # 59 would be completed. So the school stayed ad interim with Ustinov's "Hôtel du Parc". Metzler's former site in then Wilhelmstraße (today's Rechov Beer-Hofmann #15) was thus reserved for a future solitary church building. In November 1917 the school had been closed by the Britons. All the property of the congregation, Jerusalem's Association and of parishioners of German and other enemy nationality was taken into public custodianship. With the establishment of a regular British administration in 1918
Edward Keith-Roach became the
Public Custodian of Enemy Property in Palestine, who rented out the property and collected the rents, until the property was finally returned to its actual proprietors in 1925. On 14 April 1918
John Mott and
J. H. Oldham, two oecumenists, founded the
Emergency Committee of Cooperating Missions, Mott becoming the president and Oldham the secretary. Mott and Oldham succeeded to get Art. 438 into the
Treaty of Versailles, so that the property of German missions would be excepted from being expropriated for German reparations for World War I. Jerusalem's Association and the Evangelical Jerusalem Foundation had meanwhile appointed the Swedish Lutheran Archbishop
Nathan Söderblom their speaker at the Britons. The schools of Jerusalem's Association were reopened under British government management in 1920. Thus the public custodianship ended in the same year and the prior holders achieved the fully protected legal position as proprietors. Jerusalem's Association applied for registration as Palestinian legal entity, granted in 1928. Provost Rhein succeeded to resist the merger of the remaining Evangelical schools with Templer schools until 1937, on which occasion they became paganised, teaching the pupils Nazi
Weltanschauung. After the begin of the
Second World War in September 1939 all property of the Jaffa congregation, of its parishioners of German or other enemy nationality and of Jerusalem's Association were submitted to the
Custodian of Enemy Property, Keith-Roach again, and the schools were supervised by the
Committee for Supervision of German Educational Institutions under the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem,
George Francis Graham Brown. ==Church building==