People

Selig Leser served as the teacher and cantor of the Lüneburg Jewish community in the 1810s and 1820s. His name appears in surviving historical documents in various spellings and combinations: Selig Löser, Leser Seelig, Selig Leeser, etc. He was born around 1750 in Dreißigacker in Saxe-Meiningen. At that time, this small town in Thuringia was home to a relatively large and vibrant Jewish community. 

By 1814 at the latest, Selig Leser had moved to Lüneburg with his wife Jette, née Moses, and worked there as a teacher and ritual slaughterer for the synagogue community. At that time, services were usually held in the private home of Levi Isaak Ahrons.

In 1823, Selig Leser described his duties to the Lüneburg magistrate as follows: “He is the cantor and shochet of the local Jewish community, and he conducts services in the home of the Jew Levy Ahrons, in a synagogue set up for that purpose, on Shabbat and other holidays. He neither needed nor possessed a letter of protection, due to his status as cantor. He was also responsible for teaching the children of the local Jewish community. At present, however, he had no children to teach.”

Selig Leser died in January 1828. The Lüneburg town chronicler Wilhelm Volger noted that he was the first person to be buried in the “new Jewish cemetery” (established in 1823). His surviving relatives were “the deceased’s children living abroad,” namely a son in Boizenburg and a daughter in Hamburg. 

Selig Leser"s successor as schoolteacher and shochet of the community was Heimann Bernstein, who was usually referred to only as “Cantor.”



Sources and Information (in German):

History of the Jewish community in Dreissigacker, Thüringen: https://www.alemannia-judaica.de/dreissigacker_synagoge.htm

“Lüneburger Nachrichten, compiled by Wilhelm Friedrich Volger, Director of the Johanneum Secondary School. All written down from personal experience.” Transcript of Director W. F. Volger’s chronicle by Frieda Kellner, 1920, Lüneburg Town Archives, ND Volger, No. 170

Report by the Lüneburg Magistrate in February 1814 to the Provisional Government Commission in Hanover regarding the protected Jews in Lüneburg, Lüneburg Town Archives, AA 6707/1

Report from the Magistrate to the District Administration in Lüneburg regarding the protected Jews in Lüneburg dated August 24, 1823, Lüneburg Town Archives, AA 6703/2

Tables of births and deaths in the local Jewish community, 1820–1832, Lüneburg Town Archives, AA 6733

Name variants: Seelig Leeser Löser