Herchweiler - Religion

Religion

Herchweiler in the Remigiusland was originally a holding of the Bishopric of Reims, although in ecclesiastical organization, it belonged to the Archbishopric of Mainz. Going by the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, the inhabitants were forced to convert to Lutheranism beginning in 1523 as required by the ducal administration, but then in 1588, on Count Palatine Johannes I’s orders, everyone had to convert to Calvinism. After the Thirty Years' War, freedom of choice in religion was theoretically possible, though Herchweiler’s Christian inhabitants remained overwhelmingly Reformed (Calvinist). In 1818 came the Protestant Union, in which the Lutheran and Calvinist churches merged. While Catholics were once more a fifth of the population in the early 19th century, even when the Prussian section of the village was counted, their share of the population has since then shrunk to a bit more than a tenth. From the Middle Ages onwards, the village’s Christian inhabitants belonged to the Church of Konken. The Catholic Christians nowadays belong to the Church of Kusel. Jews likely settled in what was later to be the section of the village in the Saarland beginning in the early 16th century, formed their own worship community and as of 1790 owned a small house of worship, known locally as the Judenschule (“Jews’ School”). Next to this in the early 19th century was a small mikveh. Like all mikva’ot in Germany, this was no longer in use by the late 19th century. The Jewish community buried its dead at the Jewish graveyard in Thallichtenberg. As early as the late 19th century, the number of Jewish citizens in Herchweiler began to shrink markedly, reflecting a general trend throughout the Western Palatinate. After 1933 and the onset of the Third Reich, only three Jewish families still lived in the village. They were forbidden to practise their religion, and the municipality had the house of worship torn down in 1937 because of “disrepair”, on orders from the state. While the village’s Jews may have been subject to the various hardships to which all Jews in Nazi Germany fell victim, there were no excesses in Herchweiler on Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938). Three Jewish citizens in the village survived. Today, there are no longer any Jews living in Herchweiler.