Hohenems Jewish cemetery
The Jewish Cemetery Hohenems (also Israelitischer Friedhof Hohenems ) is a Jewish burial place in the Austrian city of Hohenems . The cemetery, like the town's previously existing Jewish community, has a history of almost 400 years. It was founded in 1617 with the settlement of the first Jews in Hohenems and, in contrast to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Hohenems , which was destroyed during the time of National Socialism in Austria , it still exists today.
history
The Jewish cemetery in Hohenems is as old as the first settlement of Jews in 1617, when Count Kaspar von Hohenems accepted twelve Jewish families from southern Germany and Switzerland ( Rheineck ) into his imperial county. He also assigned them a piece of land in the so-called “ Schwefel ” area at the end of Hohenems, which they could use for Jewish burials. The cemetery is located on a wooded slope of the "sulfur mountain". In total, there are probably well over 500 graves on the site. 370 tombstones have been preserved to this day. Contrary to the Christian tradition, a burial place in Judaism can only be given once. The soil surrounding the dead is respected as the property of the deceased. This indissolubility of Jewish graves makes Jewish cemeteries particularly important cultural and historical evidence.
The Jewish cemetery today
In recent years the Jewish Museum Hohenems has carried out a detailed survey of the cemetery, a photographic documentation of all the gravestones still present, a record of the German and Hebrew inscriptions (with translation into German) and an art-historical description of the most interesting gravestones. On the basis of this data, an electronic database was created that contains the name, grave number and inscriptions (including translations) of all the tombstones still present. After the Jewish cemetery survived the Nazi era undamaged, a group of descendants from Hohenems families who lived near the Swiss border in the canton of St. Gallen bought the cemetery from the Israelite community in Innsbruck and founded the “Association for the Preservation of the Jewish Cemetery” in 1954 in Hohenems ”. Although the Jewish community of Hohenems was dissolved, the cemetery still exists today. Various people have been buried there since then and some descendants and Jews living in Vorarlberg have already reserved grave sites for the future.
literature
- Bernhard Purin: The Hohenems Jewish cemetery in the 17th and 18th centuries . In: Montfort. Quarterly magazine for the past and present of Vorarlberg . 41st year, 1989 issue 3/4, ISBN 3-85430-116-2 ( full text on ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online ).
Web links
- Information material on the cemetery from the Jewish Museum Hohenems
- Database of tombstones in the Jewish cemetery , provided by the Hohenems Jewish Museum
Coordinates: 47 ° 20 ′ 48.5 " N , 9 ° 40 ′ 21.8" E