Cemetery Archives | Page 5 of 9 | World Jewish Travel

British Cemetery of Madrid

The Jews came back to Madrid only in the 1850s, sporadically and in an unorganized way. These were shopkeepers and bankers who, among other activities, were involved in the creation of the railroads. The best known of these families were the Bauers, who represented the Rothschild Bank. Since they did not have their own cemetery, they created a special section in the English cemetery in the first years of the twentieth century. A monument inspired by ancient Egypt houses te remains of Gustave Bauer (1867-1916), Manolin Bauer (1898-1906), and Ida Luisa Bauer (1906-08). Another thirty tombs remind us of the existence and origins of this small community in the early twentieth century.

Image attribution:
Edescas, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Seegasse Jewish Cemetery

The Jewish cemetery in Roßau, which is also known at the Seegasse Jewish cemetery because of its location in the Seegasse, is the oldest preserved cemetery in Vienna. Members of the city’s Jewish community were buried here between 1540 and 1783.

The Jewish cemetery lies in the suburb of Roßau in the 9th district of Vienna, Alsergrund, and covers an area of approximately 2000 m2. Today, the site is part of the yard of the old people’s home in the Seegasse and can be accessed via the home. Where the home now stands, there used to be a Jewish establishment for quarantining the sick.

In 1629, the Seegasse was known as the Gassel allwo der Juden Grabstätte and, from 1778 it was known as the Judengasse (“Jews’ lane”). In 1862, it was renamed Seegasse (Lake lane) after a fish pond that used to be in the area which was described in a document from 1415 as a “lake”.

The Jewish cemetery in the Seegasse was created in the 16th century. Between 1540 and 1783, it was the main burial site for members of Vienna’s Jewish community. Following a pogrom against Viennese Jews in 1670, the Jewish merchant Koppel Fränkel paid a sum of 4000 gulden, in return for which the city committed to maintain the cemetery. Use of the cemetery as a burial site continued thereafter until 1783, when emperor Joseph II forbade the use of all cemeteries within the city walls.

A new cemetery for the Jewish community was created outside the city walls in the suburb of Währing (see Jewish Cemetery (Währing)). In line with the edicts of the Jewish religion, the cemetery in the Seegasse was left untouched, while Christian cemeteries within the city walls were closed and built over. In 1943, the Nazi authorities resolved to raze the cemetery and to build over the site. A group of engaged Viennese Jews responded by removing some of the gravestones, which they buried at the city’s main cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof.

In the 1980s, 280 of the 931 gravestones that were buried there were rediscovered and returned to their original homes as recorded in Bernhard Wachstein’s surveys of the cemetery from the 1910s. The cemetery was sanctified once again on 2 September 1984. The inscriptions on the gravestones in the cemetery are entirely in Hebrew.

The Weissensee Cemetery

The Weißensee Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery located in the neighborhood of Weißensee in Berlin, Germany. It is the second largest Jewish cemetery in Europe covering approximately 100 acres and contains approximately 115,000 graves.

Directly in front of the entrance is a Holocaust memorial, a commemorative stone, surrounded by further stones, each with the names of concentration camps. Next to this, there is a memorial to Jews who lost their lives during World War I (which was dedicated in 1927) and also a commemorative plaque to those who fought Nazism.

The plot of land was bought by the Jewish community of Berlin, comprising – besides congregants of orthodox and reform affiliation – mostly observants of mainstream Judaism (in today’s term described at best as conservative Judaism). The old Jewish cemetery in Große Hamburger Straße, opened 1672, had reached its full capacity in 1827. The second cemetery in Schönhauser Allee, opened in the same year, reached its capacity in the 1880s, offering only few remaining gravesites in family ensembles mostly reserved for widows and widowers next to their earlier deceased spouses. Weißensee Cemetery was designed by renowned German architect Hugo Licht in the Italian Neorenaissance style. It was inaugurated in 1880. The surrounding walls and main building (where the archives are kept and the cemetery is administered) were constructed with a distinctive yellow brick. A second building (built in 1910) was destroyed during World War II.

The grave plots are arranged into 120 different sections, each with its own geometric shape. The lavish way in which the more well-to-do individuals and families interred here chose to fashion their mausoleums using the latest art nouveau designs is immediately noticeable. The periphery of the cemetery is predominantly reserved for the upper and middle classes, while the center is occupied by the less well off, in areas which are harder to reach and often overgrown by foliage.

With the rise of Nazism the existence of the cemetery was at risk (many Jewish cemeteries in Europe were destroyed) but the site survived relatively unscathed. Some 4000 graves are estimated to have been damaged by Allied bombing. After World War II, Jews from all parts of Berlin continued to use the cemetery up until 1955. Between 1955 and German reunification in 1990, only the small Jewish community in East Berlin used it.

During the four decades of the German Democratic Republic, the cemetery was relatively neglected because most of Berlin’s Jewish community had been murdered during, or had fled from, the Holocaust. Many of the graves were left unattended and became overgrown with weeds. In the 1970s, plans to build an expressway over part of the cemetery were considered, linking Michelangelostraße to the newly constructed Hansastraße. This proposal was dropped due to strong objections from the remaining Jewish community.

It has been estimated by cemetery officials that the cost of fully repairing the damage caused by years of neglect would amount to 40 million euros. On the occasion of the cemetery’s 125th anniversary, appeals were made to the Berlin government to increase funding, so that a bid can be made to add the site to the UNESCO world heritage list. The bid was supported by Berlin’s former mayor Klaus Wowereit.

Image Attribution:
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1988-0911-020 / Schindler, Karl-Heinz / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE , via Wikimedia Commons;
Neuköllner, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons;
OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The New Jewish Cemetery

The New Jewish Cemetery is a historic necropolis situated on 55 Miodowa Street in Kraków, Poland. Located in the former Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz, it covers an area of about 11 acres. Since 1999, the cemetery is a registered heritage monument. The grounds also feature a well-preserved mortuary. The New Jewish Cemetery was founded in 1800 on grounds purchased by the Jewish Qahal from the Augustinians. It was enlarged in 1836 with additional land purchased from the monks.

Following Poland’s return to independence, the New Cemetery became nearly full. From 1932 on, burials were directed to a new plot bought in 1926 by the Qahal along Abrahama Street and the one at nearby Jerozolimska Street, both in the Wola Duchacka neighborhood (now part of Podgórze district). These two other cemeteries formed the site of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp during the Holocaust and no longer exist. The Jews from the Kraków Ghetto were sent there.

Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in World War II, the New Cemetery was closed to outsiders and the Germans sold the most valuable stonework to local masons. Other headstones, as well as slabs, were turned into construction material and used for paving the supply road to the camp, including the courtyard of commandant Amon Göth, who is known for having insisted that the Jews pay for their own executions.

Meanwhile, the old bones at the cemetery were often left uncovered and scattered around in what looked like an open-pit mine. Caretaker Pina Ladner, who used to live on premises, was sent to Płaszów and shot. Soon after the war ended, a local civil engineer identified only as Mr. Stendig, likely Jakub Stendig, a camp survivor, recovered many tombstones from the Płaszów camp site, and arranged to have them reinstalled at the New Cemetery.

In 1957, the grounds were renovated with funds from the Joint Distribution Committee. After the collapse of communism on March 24, 1999, the cemetery, including the 1903 mortuary, were entered into the register of historical monuments of Kraków. The New Jewish Cemetery features a renovated brick mortuary hall from 1903, as well as the postwar lapidary memorial fitted with old headstones and crowned with a block of black marble. The cemetery contains over 10,000 tombs, the oldest dating from 1809. There are many monuments commemorating the death of Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Jewish Cemetery of Segovia

The Jewish Cemetery is located behind the Clamores River in the current municipal park of Pinarillo, displaying the presence of the Hebrews in Segovia. Traveling to the Jewish Cemetery of Segovia allows tourists to acknowledge the process of how the ancient Jews honored their own. The Jews took advantage of the limestone rocks of the Clamores River Valley in three ways, by conditioning the caves formed by nature, working with rocks corresponding to anthropomorphic pits, and creating a square or bathtub shape out of the rocks. Researchers noticed that where the Jewish Cemetery was, there are remains that have not been found yet, giving the Jewish Cemetery of Segovia its historical meaning.

Jewish Cemetery of Incarnation

The Ávila Jewish cemetery is loacted behind the Encarnación convent, giving the name Jewish Cemetery of Incarnation. The foundation of the cemterary was placed in the year 1511, when Beatriz Guiera acquired the houses of Pilón de la Mimbre, originally found, at that time, alongside the Gate of St. Vincent, alongside the Lomo synagogue. Here, Beatriz Guiera bought a Jewish Graveyard which was outside the city walls, and built his convent. During the 2012 archaeological works, many funerary structures were found. The architecture that was uncovered belonged to the graveyard of the Jewish alijama, whose community buried their dead with tombs in rows, alligned O-E, directed to the sun at the time of departure. In this cemtery, two types of tombs were established: staggered, presenting a step on either its north and south fronts, and tombs dug into a simple pit. The tombs had a sugnal on the outside, but the ones that don’t have it were the tomb buried after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

Palma Jewish Cemetery

The town of Santa Eugenia is located 22 km from the capital Palma de Mallorca and possesses the only Jewish cemetery in Mallorca. It is situated between the towns of Santa Maria and Algaida and has about 1,500 inhabitants, known as Taujans. For centuries, Santa Eugenia was under the direction of Santa Maria, a nearby town. However, Santa Eugenia became independant in the nineteenth century.

Montjuic Jewish Cemetery

Montjuïc is a hill in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It is translated as “Jew Mountain” in medieval Catalan. It is believed to have this name because of Jewish settlements and a Jewish cemetery which were once there. Because of the mountain’s strategic location on the Mediterranean and alongside the Llobregat River, this region became the perfect location for the city of Barcelona to develop.

There is evidence of the Jewish cemetery of Barcelona since the eleventh century. In 1391, with the attack on the Call of Barcelona, several tombstones were looted to be sold, and it was not until the 20th century that architectural remains were found again. Thus, in 1945, 171 graves were found after the construction of some pavilions in the area, and in 2001 an excavation uncovered 557 tombs and a tombstone.

Wintzenheim Jewish Cemetery

When entering the cemetery, this “Bäjs Aulem”, this “House of Eternity”, the contrast is great between the oldest sandstone tombs of the Vosges, whose sagging stone leans like an orant bent in prayer, and the order of the most recent burials, to whom the the rigidity of the marble or granite slabs confers a certain bourgeois respectability. A monument also commemorates members of the community and neighboring villages who perished in the resistance or in deportation during the Second World War. Opposite the entrance, a large rectangular square. A tiny plaque placed on the ground recalls that four hundred graves were torn from this cemetery, carried away by Nazi barbarism.
The traces of at least three generations have thus been erased. The graves, like the Jews at the same time, went to an unknown destination. This void, redoubled by the near absence of Jews, in a place once inhabited by a community bustling , does not fail to question us. It is all the more significant that the Jews have participated for nearly five centuries in the history of the city.
Until the end of the 18th century, the Jews of Wintzenheim had to bury their dead in the cemetery of Jungholtz, about thirty kilometers away. They had to pay a tax in each village and in each borough crossed.

It was not until 1795 that they were authorized to open a cemetery along the road to Turckheim. When it was created, the cemetery occupied an area of 26 ares. A 16-acre plot, acquired in 1826, allowed it to be enlarged in order to bury the Jews of Turckheim, Ingersheim, Wettolsheim and Munster as well. The oldest tomb that remains today dates from 2 Germinal of the year II (1797).
The oldest tombs, from around 1797 to 1860, are characterized by a relative uniformity, in accordance with the imperative of simplicity and equality which must unite the Jews in death. They respond to a restraint that refuses the ostentation of social disparities: each tomb is made up of a vertical sandstone slab. Most do not wear decorative patterns. Some are surmounted by a ball, a pine cone, a stylized flower, or even a decorated pediment. From the second half of the 19th century, there is gradually more variety in the decor: hands of the Cohanim, ewer of Lévy, weeping willow and winged hourglass. Religious, and above all social, distinction imposes its mark.

Cemetery of Selestat

In 1622, when no Jewish family lived in Sélestat, the Jews of the communities or Wintzenheim, Ribeauvillé and Bergheim no longer had any necropolis near Colmar, the city councilors refusing the extension. Also these Jews bought land around Sélestat, in the canton known as Burner, which later took the name of Paradiesweg to establish a rest area. The cemetery (named the “Paradies”), with an area of nearly 4 hectares and comprising around 4000 graves, was created around 1622.
The oldest part has been listed as an historic monument since May 10, 1995. Located to the north of the city, it was opened by the Jewish communities of Bergheim, Ribeauvillé, and Dambach-la-Ville, then enlarged several times over the centuries, in 1699, 1719, 1733 respectively. the limits: one of them bears the inscription “Bel Ain”, which means house of eternity.
In the last century, a fence wall pierced with two doors was installed; on the central portal, we can see two broken poppy branches: the poppy symbolizing sleep, and the broken branches death.
The oldest identified stele is that of Rabbi Moïse de Dambach, dating from 1666. Many Jewish personalities of the 17th century rest in this cemetery, in particular the niece of Karl Marx, Rose Blum, as well as Raisel See, heroine of the French Revolution. native of Bergheim, as well as Moïse Meier, president and general representative of the Jews of the province.
There is also the tomb of Léopold Weiller, father of Lazare Weiller, who was one of the founders of television, and of the first automobile cab company (the ancestor of taxis). He was a senator for Bas-Rhin.
This cemetery makes it possible to observe over a continuous series of changes in Jewish funerary art in the 18th century mainly, through the decorative treatment of the stelae which evolves from a fairly stripped Renaissance style to a more baroque art around the middle of the century. (Dictionary of Historical Monuments Alsace – sept. 1995)
During the Nazi Occupation, the cemetery passed into the hands of the authorities. It is the mayor, who, in 1979, ceded for the symbolic franc, the cemetery to the Jewish community.

Photo credit: Oie blanche, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Site Tag: Cemetery