Jewish cemetery (Schwerin)

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The Jewish cemetery is a historic cemetery in Schwerin , the state capital of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania .

The cemetery ( Hebrew : Bet-ha-kevarot - house of graves) is located northeast of the city center between the Schweriner Innerensee and the Heidensee in the Werdervorstadt district . Today's area on a hill at the confluence of the street Am Heidensee in the Bornhövedstraße represents only a remnant of the cemetery area. The entrance is in the street Am Heidensee . In 1950, when Bornhövedstraße was extended to Heidensee via the cemetery and in 1953, when a sewage treatment plant was built, the cemetery was forever separated from the celebration hall. The street Hinnenhof , also Hintenhof , today's Bornhövedstraße, once ended in front of the cemetery.

The Schwerin cemetery was laid out in 1717. No tombs from this period have survived. The oldest tombstone dates from 1883. The cemetery was the main burial place of the Israelite community after it was opened. The Schwerin Jewish community belonged to Alt-Strelitz to the wealthiest and most important in the region. The Jewish cemetery was first entered on the Schwerin city maps in 1819. The celebration hall built around 1800 with the cemetery attendant's apartment is drawn on a plan from 1857. A residential part is attached to the rear of the main part of the building with large, high arched windows and a large vaulted entrance door. In the gable triangles there are circular windows, the frames of which are designed in the shape of the Star of David. The hearse was placed in the rear courtyard building. Towards the street, a wrought iron gate with brick pilasters borders the complex. Due to the division of the cemetery into two parts, the celebration hall can now be reached via a 15 meter long paved footpath no.79 that branches off from Bornhövedstrasse.

The synagogue was inaugurated in 1773 , around which houses for the regional rabbi and the cantor were built. The synagogue was located in the new building erected in 1819 in the courtyard at Schlachterstrasse 3–7. In 1866 renovations were carried out according to plans by Georg Daniel . The Schwerin building officer Diederich Carl Susemihl and the master carpenter Wilhelm Peo were also involved. The half-timbered building, vaulted inside with a barrel, received a Byzantine decoration, the most important part of which was the Torah shrine crowned by a canopy with an onion dome . It had to be demolished by the Schwerin Jewish community after the November pogrom in 1938 , where it was severely violated. Burning down in the old town, which is also closely built with half-timbered houses, was not possible.

Most of the cemetery grounds were destroyed during the Nazi era and used as a flak position during World War II . The Holocaust led to the complete liquidation of the over 600 year old Jewish community. In the second half of the 1930s, burials ended in the cemetery. Interestingly, the Jewish cemetery on the city maps in 1933 as Isr. Kirchhof and 1938 of Jewish cemetery can be found. The Jewish cemetery was simply omitted from the first map of the city, which was added to the address book after the Second World War. It is recorded again in the city maps published by VEB Tourist Verlag Berlin, Leipzig in the late 1970s and is even documented with its severing. The architecture and city guides from these times mention neither the cemetery nor the celebration hall.

Most of the gravestones have been preserved. At the beginning of 1949 the cemetery and the graves were restored and around 25 tombstones were put up again. There are no more burials there today.

The Jewish cemetery also contained four war graves with victims of the First World War . In November 1925, the Israelite Community informed the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs that there are 4 graves (1 French, 3 Russians) in their cemetery . These graves were neglected and should be freshly planted and provided with stones. In April 1927, the Israelite Burial Association informed the city ​​cemetery administration of the names of the three Russian prisoners of war buried in the cemetery: Abraham Tschernawski, Ilia Apasberg and Leiba Weitzmann. The Jewish community has no information as to whether the war graves in their cemetery still exist or whether the dead have been divested.

In 1998 the Jewish cemetery was desecrated twice.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Horst Ende: Georg Daniel as an architect and preservationist in Mecklenburg. Lecture on February 11, 2004 on his 175th birthday at the State Office for Monument Preservation.
  2. ↑ Jürgen Borchert , Detlev Klose: The cemetery in Schwerin. In: What remained ... Jewish traces in Mecklenburg. 1994 pp. 84-89.
  3. ↑ Katja Pawlak: War dead in the Jewish cemetery. In: Military cemeteries and war cemeteries in the state capital Schwerin. Schwerin 2012, p. 56.
  4. ↑ Schwerin City Archives , MF No. 26.
  5. ↑ Schwerin City Archives, MF No. 26.

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Coordinates: 53 ° 38 ′ 14.8 "  N , 11 ° 25 ′ 55.8"  E