Jewish cemetery (Affaltrach)

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Jewish cemetery in Affaltrach

The Jewish cemetery in Affaltrach , a district of the Obersulm community in the Heilbronn district in northern Baden-Württemberg , served as a burial place for Jews from Affaltrach and other surrounding Jewish communities from around 1670 to 1942.

Location and terrain

View to the southwest
Tomb for Rabbi Ascher Lämmle (died 1750) from Lehrensteinsfeld
War memorial

The cemetery is north of Affaltrach on the northern slope of the salt mountain . Among the 15 Jewish cemeteries in the Heilbronn district, it is one of the oldest and with an area of ​​73.3 ares also one of the largest. It contains over 600 graves. Approximately in the middle of the cemetery, at today's entrance, there is a morgue ( Tahara House ) built in 1926 and a memorial for fallen Jewish soldiers of the First World War .

history

From around 1650 Jews came to Affaltrach and other surrounding places. The oldest well-documented grave in the cemetery dates from 1677, so that it can be assumed that the cemetery was built around 1670. The cemetery has always been owned by the local Jewish community. The deceased of the Jewish communities Talheim , Sontheim , Horkheim , Öhringen , Eschenau and Lehrensteinsfeld , which formed a cemetery association with Affaltrach, were also buried there. In 1841 the Jewish communities of Talheim, Horkheim and Sontheim, now part of the Heilbronn Oberamt , left this association and set up their own cemetery in Sontheim . From 1911 there was also its own Jewish cemetery in Öhringen , so that the last deceased from Affaltrach, Eschenau and Lehrensteinsfeld were buried.

The marl clay floor of the cemetery and its hillside location help the gravestones sink in quickly. The first renovation of the cemetery took place in 1897. At that time, heavily sunken gravestones in particular were dug up and erected again.

The cemetery has had its present area since it was built, of which only around 39 ares were used as a cemetery until 1912, while the remaining part was leased for agricultural purposes. The original entrance was in the northwest corner, where the first Tahara house of the cemetery also stood, the area of ​​which dug into the slope can still be guessed in the area. After the burials had been extended to the entire cemetery area, today's entrance gate and the Tahara House, which is still preserved today, were built in 1926. Then numerous fallen or sunken tombstones were put up again and the cemetery, which was partly heavily overgrown with scrub, was repaired.

The last burials took place from January to August 1942, when twelve deceased inmates of a Jewish retirement home that the National Socialists had forcibly set up in Eschenau Castle were buried here. Their graves received simple grave slabs only after the Second World War.

On November 26, 1942, ownership of the cemetery passed to the Reich Association of Jews in Germany . In 1949 the property was transferred to the JRSO , in 1960 to the Israelitische Kultusvereinigung Württemberg und Hohenzollern, the later Israelite religious community of Württemberg , which has been the owner of the cemetery since then.

While the cemetery survived the Nazi era relatively unscathed, desecrations and willful damage occurred primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, which resulted in many gravestones being overturned or broken. During the subsequent clean-up work, many gravestones were placed upside down, broken gravestones were partly disposed of or used as building material for the renovation of the Tahara house.

From the mid-1980s, members of the Association for the Preservation of the Affaltrach Synagogue prepared comprehensive documentation of the cemetery, which began in 1990. More than 600 tombstones were documented and numbered, the inscriptions of over 500 could be deciphered and translated from Hebrew, the rest of them were already too badly weathered. The full documentation was submitted in 1998.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obersulm. Six villages - one municipality. Obersulm municipality, Obersulm 1997 . P. 339
  2. ^ Wolfram Angerbauer , Hans Georg Frank: Jewish communities in the district and city of Heilbronn . Heilbronn district, Heilbronn 1986 (series of publications by the Heilbronn district, 1). P. 234
  3. ↑ On the Jewish cemetery in Öhringen from alemannia-judaica.de (accessed on September 14, 2008), also from Sauer (1966) and in Jüdische Bürger in Öhringen - a documentation , Öhringen 1993; wrong "1915" in Ritter (1995), p. 10.
  4. ↑ On the history of the Jewish community in Eschenau at alemannia-judaica.de (accessed on September 14, 2008)

literature

  • Martin Ritter: The Affaltrach Jewish Cemetery , Affaltrach 1995
  • Martin Ritter: On the history of the Jewish community Affaltrach . In: Obersulm. Six villages - one municipality. Obersulm municipality, Obersulm 1997 . Pp. 324-335

Web links

Commons : Jüdischer Friedhof (Affaltrach)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 49 ° 8 '38.4 "  N , 9 ° 23' 2.9"  E