Jewish cemetery (Rostock)

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Memorial at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Rostock

The Old Jewish Cemetery in Rostock is the historic cemetery of the Israelite community in the Hanseatic city . The listed burial place was used from 1873 to 1942.

Cemetery in the 13th and 14th centuries

The Jewish community in Rostock, which had existed since the middle of the 13th century, was granted a burial site in 1279. As a result, a cemetery was created northwest of the city outside the city walls in front of the Kröpeliner Tor , probably at the Vögenteich, which no longer exists, because in the 14th century one was still referred to as being at the Jewish cemetery to distinguish it from water mills there. There are no traces of this cemetery, which was abandoned after the Jews were expelled from Rostock around 1350.

Old Jewish Cemetery

Schematic site plan of the Rostock Jewish cemetery (Lindenpark), status: October 2018. The numbers refer to the names recorded in May 2018.

After Jews were allowed to settle in the city again from 1868 onwards, they founded the Rostock Israelite Community in 1870 with 118 souls in 1871. The community opened the Old Jewish Cemetery in the year it was founded . This was set up on about 3500 square meters to the east on the edge, but outside the southern corner of the former public cemetery, which was occupied with graves between 1831 and 1959, on urban land, which is now rededicated as Lindenpark. Jewish communities accept eternal grave rest as binding, so they open cemeteries on property that has been acquired in a peculiar way in order to be able to defend against any disturbance of the rest of the dead by later re-occupation, clearing of graves or even rededication of the site.

Documentation from 1994 on the holdings in the cemetery is available in the Rostock city archive and the names of all gravestones and names still present were recorded in May 2018. After this recording, the first burial of 20-year-old Minna Herzfeld from Brüel took place in January 1873 . The older information about the first funeral of Julius Levy in August 1873 is therefore not correctly reproduced in the literature. By 1942, a total of 360 people were buried in this cemetery. Today (as of May 2018) 182 grave sites are still recognizable, with 176 tombstones ( Mazewot ) preserved, of which 29 are lying on the lawn. The grave stones of Berta Samuel, b. Gessner, wife of Max Samuels , 1923–1938 community chairman , the factory owner Siegmund Bernhard (1846–1934), 1900–1923 community chairman , and his son Arnold , 1938–1941 last chairman of the Rostock Israelite community , which then fled as a result of the decline in membership and expulsion was incorporated into the Reich Association of Jews as a mere administrative body .

In 1963 a memorial stone was erected and in 1978 the gravestones were placed on the lawn. In 1988 the tombstones were erected again and a new memorial was inaugurated.

The Old Jewish Cemetery was a target of anti-Semitic attacks in 2002 and 2003 .

New Jewish cemetery

Today's Rostock Jewish Community, at the time looked after by Rabbi Andrew Steiman, set up the New Jewish Cemetery in 1996 on a section of the Rostock West Cemetery, which was opened in 1977 .

Web links

Commons : Jüdischer Friedhof Rostock  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

References and footnotes

  1. ^ A b Frank Schröder, Ingrid Ehlers: Between Emancipation and Destruction. On the history of the Jews in Rostock . (= Series of publications by the Rostock City Archives; issue 9). Stadtarchiv, Rostock 1988, p. 90.
  2. ↑ a b c Rostock Jewish Cemetery on findagrave.com, accessed on November 21, 2018.
  3. ↑ Frank Schröder, Ingrid Ehlers: Between Emancipation and Destruction. On the history of the Jews in Rostock . Stadtarchiv, Rostock 1988, p. 15.
  4. ↑ Frank Schröder, Ingrid Ehlers: Between Emancipation and Destruction. On the history of the Jews in Rostock . Stadtarchiv, Rostock 1988, p. 86.
  5. ↑ Frank Schröder, Ingrid Ehlers: Between Emancipation and Destruction. On the history of the Jews in Rostock . Stadtarchiv, Rostock 1988, p. 16.
  6. ↑ Christiane Schröder and Almuth Wagner with the assistance of Anja Böhringer a. a., Documentation on the Rostock Jewish Cemetery . [Rostock 1994] (manuscript), Rostock city archive, signature 1.1.14. - Cemetery Authority and Old Cemetery.
  7. ^ Tomb slab of Berta Samuel geb. Gessner
  8. ^ Frank Schröder: Art. Rostock . In: Irene Diekmann (Ed.): Guide through the Jewish Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania , published on behalf of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies . Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam 1998, ISBN 3-930850-77-X , pp. 195–223, here p. 219.
  9. ↑ Ulf Heinsohn: Jews in Rostock then and now [engl. Original: Rostock's Jews: then and now , 2015], Gideon Gerlinger (transl.). Typescript of the Max-Samuel-Haus, Rostock 2016, column 5.

Coordinates: 54 ° 4 '54.3 "  N , 12 ° 7' 7.2"  E