Jewish cemetery (Darmstadt)

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Jewish cemetery Darmstadt

The Jewish cemetery in the Hessian city ​​of Darmstadt was built around 1680 on the Bessunger district. The Jewish cemetery , which was not destroyed during the National Socialist era , is one of the most important preserved structures of its kind in Germany.

history

Elisabeth Dorothea Landgravine of Hessen-Darmstadt approved the construction of a Jewish cemetery in 1680. In 1701 the area in the neighboring village of Bessungen was acquired for a cemetery by the first Jewish community in Darmstadt, which had formed around 1700, and inaugurated in 1709. Until then, the dead were buried in Alsbach . Around 1830, 1861 and lastly in 2001, with 1400 square meters, the church was expanded. The entrance on the north side was built in 1863. Between 1933 and 1945, the Christian cemetery gardener Oskar Werling was able to largely prevent desecration and destruction. In 2007 a mourning hall was inaugurated.

Location and characterization

Entrance building to the Darmstadt Jewish cemetery
Alley of the Jewish cemetery

The burial site is on the edge of the Steinbergviertel in Bessungen, between Seekatzstrasse and Martinstrasse. It has an area of ​​134 ares and about 1800 tombstones ( mazewot ). The oldest tombstone dates from 1714 and is named Kaila Löw. The old, western part of the cemetery is characterized by tombstones made of red sandstone with inscriptions in Hebrew throughout. There are also dark and white marble monuments on the new, eastern part of the cemetery. There are also some German inscriptions. The Orthodox religious society that emerged after a split in 1872/73 buried its members in an area separated by a wall, with its own morgue and separate entrance, located between the old and the new cemetery.

Behind the entrance, an Egyptian-style portal planned by the city architect Friedrich Anton Louis in 1863, an avenue opens up the cemetery. A war memorial for the members of the Darmstadt Jewish community who fell in World War I 1914–1918, a very rare testimony, stands in the middle of the area. A bronze plaque from 1959 commemorates the members of the Jewish community who perished during the Nazi era . The painter Ludwig Meidner, among others, found his final resting place in the cemetery .

A quarry stone wall delimits the listed cemetery.

Graves of famous personalities

literature

  • City of Darmstadt. Cultural monuments in Hessen. Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany , ed. from the State Office for Monument Preservation Hesse, Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn Verlagsges., Braunschweig 1994, ISBN 3-528-06249-5 , pp. 529-534

Web links

Commons : Jewish Cemetery  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany: Cultural monuments in Hesse: City of Darmstadt. Vieweg, Braunschweig 1994, ISBN 3-528-06249-5 , p. 531
  2. ^ Rainer Hein: A small work of the century . In: faz.net, January 24, 2007 ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.faz.net
  3. ↑ See: Gerold Bönnen : The memorial for the fallen soldiers of the First World War on the new Jewish cemetery in Worms and its importance in a regional comparison . In: Jahrbuch für Westdeutsche Landesgeschichte 32 (2006), pp. 367–396 (388–390). Also as an online PDF .

Coordinates: 49 ° 51 ′ 27 "  N , 8 ° 39 ′ 37.8"  E