Jewish cemetery (Erlangen)

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Jewish cemetery in Erlangen
Tahara house in the Jewish cemetery in Erlangen

The Erlangen Jewish Cemetery in Erlangen , a town in the Bavarian administrative district of Middle Franconia , was established in 1891. It is located on the northern slope of the Burgberg , on Rudelsweiherstrasse .

history

The Jewish community Erlangen buried after its foundation in 1873 their dead first on the Jewish cemetery in Baiersdorf . After long negotiations between the board of directors and the City of Erlangen's magistrate, Erlangen was able to set up its own Jewish cemetery , which was inaugurated on September 30, 1891 by the rabbi of the district rabbinate Fürth Jakob Neuburger .

At the same time as the cemetery was laid out, a Tahara house with a cemetery keeper's apartment was built in the entrance area . The cemetery has an area of ​​27.20 acres . Today there are three distinguishable sub-areas on this area: the area in the west, which was occupied with old graves between 1891 and 1947; adjoining this, but at a distance, grave area for the dead of today's Jewish religious community after its re-establishment in 1997 (see below). The third area forms a garden plot with the Tahara house. The (first) partial area with the old graves in the western area contains the graves of 166 people who were verifiably buried there until 1939. The exact number of children's graves in the northwest is not known. In addition, there are memorial inscriptions on older epitaphs for family members who became victims of the Shoah , including z. B. Jenny Rotenstein, who perished in Theresienstadt . There are also some reserved grave areas for family members who managed to escape from their homeland in the Third Reich. The memorial to a Jewish soldier from an Erlangen family who died in France during World War I and was buried there (Lothar Hopfenmaier) is remarkable. After the liberation of Germany in 1945, a few Jewish dead were buried, of which only one woman from Bamberg received a tomb ( Mazewa ).

time of the nationalsocialism

The cemetery was desecrated by strangers for the first time in May 1939. A few weeks later, almost all of the tombstones were knocked over and a scrap metal dealer stole almost all of the metal grave jewelry. The last burial took place in this state in September 1939, before the holy place was closed for decades after two to five, mostly anonymous, burials between 1945 and 1947. When the American army moved into Erlangen in 1945, two former Erlangen soldiers were among the liberators who had the cemetery with the graves of their ancestors restored to a dignified state (Max Fleischmann and Leo Dingfelder).

Current condition

After the cemetery and the Tahara House, which was Aryanized during the Nazi era, became the property of the State Association of Israelite Communities in Bavaria in the 1950s, the maintenance of the area was the responsibility of the city of Erlangen in the coming decades. In 1983 they erected a memorial stone for the Erlangen Jewish community that was destroyed during the Nazi era . The cemetery keeper's apartment was inhabited for many years. This state of affairs was ended when, following the re-establishment of the Erlangen Jewish Community in 1997, the need arose to restore the cemetery to its original use. The Jewish Community of Erlangen has been the legal owner of its cemetery again since 2014.

Today the dead of the new Jewish religious community are buried in the second part of the cemetery (see above), which arose after its re-establishment in 1997, after Jewish contingent refugees from the former Soviet republics also came to Erlangen. There are now 40 new graves. The new graves offer an impression of today's sepulchral culture. One of the people buried here is z. B. Ruth Scherk, who was the founder of the first Montessori kindergarten in Berlin.

The Tahara House in the third section of the cemetery was restored in 2015-2017 and has been used exclusively for cultic purposes since its consecration by Rabbi Shimon Grossberg from Nuremberg on June 25, 2017.

To celebrate the 125th anniversary of the consecration of the cemetery in 1891, a memorial was erected on September 29, 2016 in the access area to the cemetery area, on which the names of the victims of the events of the Third Reich related to Erlangen are named. The realization was made possible by the patronage of Erlangen companies, associations and private individuals.

literature

  • Klaus-Dieter Alicke: Lexicon of the Jewish communities in the German-speaking area. Volume 1: Aach - Groß-Bieberau. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2008, ISBN 978-3-579-08077-2 ( online edition ).
  • Israel Schwierz: Stone evidence of Jewish life in Bavaria. A documentation . Published by the Bavarian State Center for Political Education in Munich. Bayerische Verlags-Anstalt, Bamberg 1988, ISBN 3-87052-393-X , p. 152.
  • Ilse Sponsel: "Traces in Stone" - 100 years of the Israelite cemetery in Erlangen. September 30, 1891 - September 30, 1991 . Published by the city of Erlangen. Mayor and press office, City of Erlangen 1991, ( Erlanger materials booklet 6). [not evaluated]

Web links

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

Coordinates: 49 ° 36 ′ 42 ″  N , 11 ° 0 ′ 9 ″  E