Jewish cemetery (Lom)
Coordinates: 43 ° 49'22.1 " N , 23 ° 13'49" E
The Jewish cemetery in Lom is a no longer maintained Jewish cemetery in the city of Lom in northwestern Bulgaria . It was founded in 1820, the last funeral took place in 1974.
From the 11th to 13th centuries, Ashkenazi Jews settled in several places on the lower Danube . In the 16th century, the Sephardic Jews, expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, assumed the leading role in the Jewish communities of the areas of the Balkans under Ottoman rule. While 31 Jewish households were counted in neighboring Vidin , located like Lom on the Danube in 1585 (the equivalent of 217 people), the number of Jews further downstream in Russe was lower. According to Stanford J. Shaw, Lom is mentioned together with Kyustendil , Samokow and Wraza as a place with a smaller Jewish community in the 16th century. According to other researchers, the first Jews came to Lom around 1800 or shortly after the Crimean War (1853-1856), where they settled next to the residential area of the Turks and mainly engaged in retail trade.
After the Second World War , almost 90 percent of Bulgarian Jews emigrated to Israel. Around 20 Jews were still living in Lom at the turn of the millennium.
There are no traces of an older Jewish cemetery that might exist in Lom. The existing Jewish gravestones are in an open field on a hill on the western edge of the city. The place can be reached from the central, north-south running pedestrian zone, Zar-Simeon-Strasse, along Schipka-Strasse, which leads west up the hill into a village residential area. The tombstones are on a dirt road on the edge of an agricultural area extending to the west. They are reminiscent of one of the smaller of the 24 known Jewish cemeteries in Bulgaria . The nearest houses are 50 to 100 meters away. The area is owned by the city administration.
A Jewish-American commission in 2001 estimated around 100 tombstones ( Mazewa ) on an area of half a hectare. Since then, their number has decreased significantly, and some gravestones are overgrown with grass. The cemetery is not fenced and has been repeatedly looted. A dirt road crosses the area, which partly serves as a wild garbage dump. As in the Jewish cemetery in Vidin, there are no longer any upright tombstones. The grave slabs are made of granite or marble and have inscriptions in Bulgarian and Hebrew .
Web links
- Jewish Historic Monuments and Sites in Bulgaria. United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, 2011, pp. 33f
Individual evidence
- ^ Stanford J. Shaw: The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. (New Perspectives on Jewish Studies) New York University Press, 1991, p. 39
- ^ Jewish Historic Monuments and Sites in Bulgaria. United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, 2011, p. 33
- ↑ Dimiter N. Popov: Lom. The Town and Its District: Economic Development and Short Geographic and History Notes. Lom 1927 (in the original Bulgarian); based on: Jacques Eskenazi, Alfred Krispin: Jews in the Bulgarian Hinterland. An Annotated Bibliography. (Judaica Bulgarica) International Center for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations, Sofia 2002, p. 489