Jewish cemetery (Oberwesel)

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The Oberwesel Jewish cemetery is an 18th century burial place for Jews from the communities of Oberwesel and Perscheid . It is located in what is now the Rhein-Hunsrück district of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate . The last burial took place in 1942, but according to Jewish understanding it would be wrong to speak of an abandoned cemetery.

Cemetery grounds on the Gray Lay

Location and condition of the cemetery

Terrain on the Gray Lay

The Jewish cemetery is located in the north-western district above the city, on an area known as "An der Grau Lay". With this parcel of land, the Jews received an agriculturally less usable northern slope, which was located on the edge of a plateau and was not suitable for viticulture because of its scant solar radiation . The land above the Rhine Valley, the subsoil of which is mostly stony and rocky, has only a thin crust of earth and is also called "Auf der Hardt " by the long-established inhabitants of the region . The strip of land sheltering the cemetery stretches out as fallow land, partly also with forest or bushes, as a slope along the Niederbach valley leading to Damscheid .

The cemetery address is therefore Damscheider Weg, hall 8, no. 714/43. It is a dirt road reserved for agricultural vehicles only. The steeply sloping cemetery area in the shape of a rectangle with sparse trees has a size of 27.21 ares and is surrounded by a massive metal fence. The entrance is formed by brick posts made of quarry stone, which hold two iron gate wings and are each decorated with a Star of David , a symbol of Judaism and the people of Israel .

history

Jewish burial culture

In biblical times there should not have been any Jewish cemeteries, but only family graves in which the relatives saw themselves reunited in death. The burial is, however, a millennia to be tracked ritual of the Jews, a fact that even in the Middle Ages the majority Christian was known population in our region, and - albeit with considerable restrictions - was respected. In the imperial city time of Oberwesel (1220–1309), the burials of the tolerated roommates had to take place in front of the city gates. But only if the financial strength of the Jews was sufficient to purchase a cemetery property. If Jewish communities did not have their own cemetery, other communities provided help so that the deceased had to be transported to cemeteries far away. Such and other tasks related to the burial of a parishioner were performed by the Chewra Kadisha . This was a “holy community” that had formed as a brotherhood or sisterhood in all those congregations that had their own cemetery and took on all the tasks in these that were necessary for a dignified burial of a deceased congregation member.

Installation of Jewish burial sites

Jews probably came to the Rhine with the Roman conquerors, where they settled, lived, died and were buried. It is not known whether Jews were also buried - possibly as soldiers - in the Roman necropolises on arterial roads . From this time, but also from the following centuries, Jewish tombs in particular have not survived on this side of the Alps. There are 20 Jewish communities between the 9th and 11th centuries, most of whose cemeteries can still be found on the Rhine , Moselle and Nahe .

Despite the years of National Socialist rule, there are over 2,200 Jewish cemeteries in Germany. In the past, however, having your own cemetery property required a financially strong community that was able to acquire an adequate piece of land. There may have been several facilities of this type over the centuries, which the civil community overturned, then plundered and sold in the ups and downs between the toleration and expulsion of Jewish communities, but which were eventually rebuilt. An example of this is not only the Jewish history in Cologne with the old cemetery on the Judenbüchel .

The oldest news about Jews in Oberwesel can be found in the Reich tax register from 1241 . At that time the Jews paid the very high amount of XX (twenty)  marks of silver as a Jewish tax based on the Jewish shelf . After the alleged ritual murder of Werner von Oberwesel , there was a pogrom for which the Oberwesel citizens were punished. A Jewish school in Oberwesel is (again) documented for 1452 . There is permanent evidence of a Jewish community in Oberwesel since the end of the 17th century. Preserved tombstones showing the dates of death in 1718/1731 confirm this and allow the conclusion that the community with a cemetery existed even earlier.

The cemetery in Prussian times

In Prussian times, a new behavior often appeared in linguistic usage. There were, for example, Israelite schools and the Israelite cemetery in Oberwesel was also used by the Jews living in Perscheid . This was laid out in the first half of the 18th century and was possibly expanded a century later, connecting the two main paths. The iron fencing of the site is dated to the late 19th century. It is laid out as a picket fence , and the gate wings of the single entrance each received an incorporated Star of David for decoration. According to a statute of 1888, the cemetery was owned by the Oberwesel synagogue community.

  • 19th century fence and gate wing

  • Middle path of the plant

  • Stairway next to a violently overturned grave structure

  • View of the valley

The current condition of the facility

The irregular rectangle of the cemetery grounds lies transversely behind the centrally installed gate entrance. The unpaved path leading to this then continues in the same way as a narrow middle and main path. Due to the overgrown green, the further way is hardly to be made out. The steep hillside situation required various staircases to be laid out laterally in the rocky ground, which enable uphill or downhill grave sites to be reached.

According to the traditional Jewish burial culture, deceased people were also buried here in such a way that they were laid with their feet towards the city of Jerusalem . The stelae erected above their heads also point in this direction with their inscribed sides. Among the single and double graves, the erection of which often required high grave borders on a hillside, there are gravestones inscribed in pure Hebrew as well as those gravestones ( called Mazevot in Hebrew ) that are provided with data on the buried person in a mixture of both languages. This custom is the continuation of the marking of a burial place in ancient times, which is traced back to Gen 35: 19-20  EU . The oldest deciphered tombstones come from the first half of the 18th century. It is that of "Breinle", daughter of "Avraham", who died on December 11, 1718 (or 1738), and the tombstone of "Meir", son of "Moshe", who died on December 16, 1731 . The simple form of the early stelae is characteristic, which was often modeled on that of the biblical tablets of the Law of the Ten Commandments .

The partially overturned grave monuments are also striking in this cemetery, but it is not possible for the visitor to determine whether the damage was caused by the Nazi era or whether it is the desecration of today's anti-Semites . Severe damage had to be found when even the most massive graves were overturned when the cemetery was desecrated in 1978.

Heroes of the First World War on the rescued tablet from the desecrated synagogue

The cemetery area is made up of 66 tombstones, 9 of which are said to come from the 18th century and the remainder mainly from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Approximately in the middle of the main path, the plaque rescued from the vandalized synagogue on Schaarplatz in 1938 was attached to one of the high grave borders, on which the names of the Jewish fallen who lost their lives in the First World War for the fatherland are written. The older tombstones that still exist are partially fragmented, all burials from the 18th century up to the last burial in 1942 were recorded and published in a documentation between 2002 and 2003 by Doris Spormann and Willi Wagner as part of the Hunsrück project (occupancy plan, occupancy list) .

The last burial in the cemetery was that of Henriette Cahn born Schwarz. It took place in January 1942 at a time when the tracking down of the last remaining Jews in Oberwesel was started, in order to first transfer them to assembly camps located in places with railway lines that led directly to the "death camps". A camp in Koblenz is primarily cited as such a transit camp for the Jews arrested in Oberwesel. However, more distant places such as Cologne-Müngersdorf , Düsseldorf , Darmstadt and Berlin are also mentioned. It was only from there that the final deportations to the extermination camps, organized and carried out by the National Socialists , began .

Monument protection and care

The town's Jewish cemetery is a protected cultural monument under the Monument Protection Act (DSchG) and entered in the list of monuments of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate .

Students of the history course of the Oberwesel "Heuss-Adenauer Mittelrhein-Realschule plus" took over the care of the Jewish cemetery.

Further information

literature

  • Anton Schwarz: A journey through time through Oberwesel , Bauverein Historische Stadt Oberwesel e. V. 2000 (Ed.), Printing: HVA Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Heidelberg.
  • Konrad Schilling In: Monumenta Judaica. 2000 years of history and culture of the Jews on the Rhine. Handbook for the exhibition in the Cologne City Museum Oct. 1963 - Febr. 1964 . On behalf of the city of Cologne. Edited by Konrad Schilling. [Vol. 1:] - Cologne 1963, Bachem publishing house.
  • Doris Spormann and Willi Wagner: The synagogue communities in St. Goar and Oberwesel in the 19th and 20th centuries . Traces of rural Jewish community life on the Middle Rhine. In: Sachor, contributions to Jewish history in Rhineland-Palatinate s. 1992 issue 3 pp. 22-30.
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Bredt, cemetery and tomb: “The Jewish cemeteries” in communications from the Rhenish Association for the Preservation of Monuments and Heritage Protection, 10th year (1916).
  • Christof Pies (among others): Jewish life in the Rhein-Hunsrück district . Hunsrück History Association V. (Ed.) Volume 40, Argenthal 2004. ISBN 3-9807919-7-1 .

Remarks

  1. ^ A b Anton Schwarz, A journey through time through Oberwesel, in: Bauverein Historische Stadt Oberwesel, p. 96 ff
  2. ^ A b Doris Spormann: The synagogue communities in St. Goar and Oberwesel in the 19th and 20th centuries , Die Synagogengemeinde p. 24
  3. ↑ a b Christof Pies, in: Jüdisches Leben im Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis , section death and burial, p. 71, and section Oberwesel p. 148 ff
  4. ↑ Christof Pies, in: Jüdisches Leben im Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis , pp. 98 ff
  5. ↑ Jews in Oberwesel at the local initiative Victorat ( Memento of the original from February 2, 2014 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.victorat.de
  6. ↑ Doris Spormann and Willi Wagner in: Christof Pies, Jüdisches Leben im Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis , p. 148 ff.
  7. ^ Doris Spormann and Willi Wagner in: Christof Pies (among others): Jüdisches Leben im Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis , p. 151.
  8. ↑ Doris Spormann and Willi Wagner in: Christof Pies: Jüdisches Leben im Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis , p. 153
  9. ↑ Oberwesel accessed January 14, 2014
  10. ↑ Doris Spormann and Willi Wagner in: Christof Pies (among others): Jewish life in the Rhein-Hunsrück district , section “Oberwesel / Perscheid victims of the Shoa”, p. 164 f.

Web links

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

Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 22.6 ″  N , 7 ° 42 ′ 52 ″  E