Jewish cemetery (Westend)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jewish Cemetery

The Jewish cemetery is located in the hilly street in the district Westend in Mönchengladbach ( Nordrhein-Westfalen ).

The cemetery was laid out in 1841. It was entered under no. H 061 on March 17, 1993 in the monuments list of the city of Mönchengladbach .

location

The cemetery is located south of the Geroweiher on the Hügelstrasse leading to Dahl .

architecture

It is a cemetery surrounded by a high, partly plastered brick wall with a small morgue built in 1914 in the southwest corner. The cemetery is the result of multiple property purchases or forced land transfers, which led to its current shape. The older northern part of the area was occupied in three phases between 1841 and 1910.

First burials took place in the middle, now leveled area and then continued in the western part. After this second section was also occupied around 1892, the area east of the central area was turned to. In 1892/1893, the synagogue community ceded a strip of land to the city to widen the Hügelstrasse in order to be able to buy new space on the south side of the burial ground. This older section still has 37 gravestones , some heavily weathered, with some illegible inscription and four gravestones marked with purely Hebrew inscriptions .

The monuments follow roughly uniform, traditional design criteria. Their simplicity points to the equality of all people after death. The mostly high rectangular stones have triangular gables, wave gables, hipped or tent roof-shaped ends, some with attachments. These monuments were mostly erected from a light brown sandstone (Ruhr sandstone). Inscription tablets are usually made of white marble and set deep in the gravestones. They have Hebrew or Hebrew / German inscriptions on the front, German or no inscriptions on the reverse . Not infrequently only fragments of the tombstones are preserved.

On the larger southern part of the cemetery, which was only acquired through the acquisitions in 1891 and 1899, the gravestones have less uniform shapes due to the tendency towards secularization and the liberalization of the Jewish faith. In addition to the traditional formats, very low monuments reminiscent of open books, as well as steles and obelisks , columns, slabs and even elaborate, multi-part monuments made of igneous , basic or light-colored calcareous rocks were displayed. In addition, grave borders are common, with the grave sites mostly covered with pebbles .

The more recent graves differ neither in the shape and material of the tombstones nor in the planting or design of the graves from those of communal or denominational cemeteries. A stately avenue of plane trees leads to a temple-like memorial built for the victims of the First World War . A structure supported by columns at the corners rises above three steps and a base on a square floor plan . The four recessed viewing surfaces have inscriptions written in German or Hebrew, which are covered with wave gables and lead into a stilted dome. Another memorial, inaugurated in 1952, commemorates the victims of the Nazi regime .

Its inscription refers to the story of Cain's murder of his brother Abel from Genesis and reads:

“And the Eternal said to Cain: / What have you done? / The voice of your / brother's blood cries out to me from / the ground. / Our martyrs / the years 1933–1945 / in eternal memory. "

See also

literature

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Monuments list of the city of Mönchengladbach ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / pb.moenchengladbach.de

Coordinates: 51 ° 11 ′ 18 "  N , 6 ° 25 ′ 44.6"  E