Jewish cemetery (Augsburg)

The Augsburg Jewish cemetery in the Hochfeld district has served Augsburg Jews as a burial place since 1867. Until then, they had buried their dead in the Jewish cemetery of Kriegshaber .

history

A Jewish cemetery has been documented in medieval Augsburg since at least 1298. This was destroyed after 1450 and the tombstones were misused as building material. After the dissolution of the Jewish community around 1440, some Jews from Augsburg settled in the vicinity. Only from 1803 were Jews living permanently in Augsburg again. Until 1868 they buried their dead at the cemetery in Kriegshaber. In 1867, the then chairman of the Israelite religious community founded in 1861, Carl von Obermayer, acquired the required property in the Augsburg district of Hochfeld.

The cemetery is surrounded by a solid brick wall and is divided into a northern and a southern half by a connecting path between the main entrance on Haunstetter Straße and the (unused) rear entrance on Alten Postweg . High hedges divide the cemetery into further sections. Today the cemetery has around 1,500 graves. 135 known tombs alone were made by the famous stonemasons Max Koppel & Sons from Nördlingen . Even Fritz Landauer , the architect of the synagogue in Augsburg , has designed a number of remarkable grave times especially for deceased members of his family.

The cemetery was repeatedly desecrated by anti-Semites as early as the 1920s and 1930s. Numerous tombstones were damaged and destroyed. In 1942, some monuments were shot at by German soldiers with rifles, as can be seen from the striking bullet holes. In a US air raid on 25 February 1944 to the neighboring plants of Messerschmitt AG in the district Haunstetten an explosive bomb hit the center of the cemetery and destroyed the then abused as a warehouse Taharahaus complete. The neighboring wall areas were also smashed, some surrounding tombstones, including a tombstone of the Gitel Kalonimos from 1334 that was erected at the cemetery in 1890 and previously rediscovered during construction work on the site of the medieval Jewish cemetery. The last attack on the cemetery so far, with some tombstones knocked over happened in 1991.

After the Second World War, the cemetery is the only one in the whole of Bavarian Swabia that belongs to an existing Jewish community and is therefore used for the deceased from all over the district. Today (as of October 2012) the cemetery only offers space for around 50 burials. In the near future, a separate area for further Jewish graves is to be set up at the New East Cemetery.

Special monuments

Children's memorial at the Jewish cemetery in Augsburg Hochfeld

Children's monument : The children's graves department is on the southern side at the entrance. In December 2010, the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Schwaben-Augsburg erected a memorial with 82 identified names and dates and a dedication in memory of the children's gravestones destroyed by the Nazis.

Soldier memorial: On the south side of the Tahara there is a tripartite memorial for the fallen Jewish soldiers of the First World War.

Holocaust Memorial : A Hebrew-German memorial inscription for the six million murdered Jews of the Nazi era was erected on the north side of the entrance in 1960.

Tahara House : In 1961, the architect Hermann Zvi Guttmann from Frankfurt am Main, who also restored the prayer room of the Augsburg synagogue, rebuilt the Tahara, which was destroyed in the war.

Fountain : At the east end of the cemetery, near Alter Postweg, there has been a fountain in the shape of a menorah since 1982 .

Tomb created by Fritz Landauer for Samuel Landauer

Gravestone of Mieczysław "Mietek" Pemper

Graves of important personalities

Max Obermayer (1824–1886), banker, consul of the USA and Argentina in Augsburg

Salomon Rosenbusch (1825–1895), community chairman

Benno Klopfer (1830–1897), banker

Heinrich Gross (1835–1910), 1875–1910 district rabbi in Augsburg

Heinrich Landauer (1838–1917), textile manufacturer and councilor

Wilhelm Hesselberger (1841–1892), hop trader

Gustav Oberndorf (1843–1906), US consul in Augsburg

Samuel Landauer (1846–1937), orientalist

Ludwig Bauer (1847–1913), community chairman

August Bühler (1856–1910), banker

Richard Grünfeld (1863–1931), 1910–1929 district rabbi in Augsburg

Siegfried Bernheim (1866–1937), textile manufacturer

Karl Raff (1871–1924), textile manufacturer

Ludwig Dreyfuß (1883–1960), 1945–1946 mayor of Augsburg

Friedrich Georg Friedmann (1912–2008), Americanist, honorary academic citizen of the University of Augsburg

Marian Spokojny (1918–2009), community secretary and prayer leader

Ernst Cramer (1913–2010), publicist and chairman of the Axel Springer Foundation

Mieczysław Pemper (1920–2011), entrepreneur and honorary citizen of the city of Augsburg

Israel Melcer (1922-2006), furniture manufacturer

Rafail Samoylovych (1926-2007), poet

literature

Israel Schwierz: Stone evidence of Jewish life in Bavaria. A documentation . Bavarian State Center for Political Education (Ed.), Munich 1988, pp. 232-234, ISBN 3-87052-393-X
Yehuda Shenef: Love is the poetry star. The Jewish cemetery in Augsburg - Hochfeld. History, inscriptions, grave registers, biographies, photos , Jüdisch Historischer Verein Augsburg 2018, 220 pages, ISBN 978-3752856569

Web links

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

48.348869 10.902182Coordinates: 48 ° 20 ′ 55.9 ″ N , 10 ° 54 ′ 7.9 ″ E