Jewish cemetery Kassel

View over the old part of the cemetery

Various cemeteries can be described as the Jewish cemetery in Kassel . Two of these cemeteries, the old and the new Jewish cemetery , still exist in Kassel- Bettenhausen today .

history

The first Jewish cemetery has been mentioned in documents since the 13th century. Its location is presumed to be in the Fulda in the area of the Ahn estuary near the Judengasse, as the Jews were under the protection of the Ahnaberg monastery at that time and Jewish cemeteries at that time were located in areas such as swamps, mountainous slopes or forest areas that were considered unusable for agriculture .

In the course of the city expansion of Kassel from around 1385 to around 1587, a new cemetery for the Jewish community was built outside the city limits in front of the moat, which was located roughly at today's Königsplatz .

The now preserved old Jewish cemetery was laid out in the district of Bettenhausen around 1630 during the Thirty Years' War and served as a burial place for the Jewish communities of Kaufungen , Heiligenrode and Waldau . Until the time of National Socialism , the graves themselves from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century were completely preserved in the cemetery. In the cemetery only recumbent gravestones were used until around 1800 , only then were there also standing stones. In 1841, Jeremias Rothfels bought the newer part of the cemetery and donated it to the community. A memorial was erected in the old cemetery for the Jewish soldiers who died in the First World War .

Cemetery hall in the old Jewish cemetery
Cenotaph from 1920 for the Kassel Jews who died in the First World War
Memorial stone for the Jewish citizens of Kassel who perished under National Socialism
Monument in memory of those murdered by the Shoah "Erected by the Jewish committee Lager Hasenhecke" (sc. DP camp Kassel) on the new part of the Jewish cemetery
Gravestones with bullet holes in the old Jewish cemetery

The new Jewish cemetery was opened in 1932, diagonally across from Fasanenweg, as a continuation of the communal cemetery. Burials took place here until 1942, but in the end without any stones being set. In the central part of the cemetery, Russian and Polish forced laborers were buried during World War II without any tombstones being erected.

After the end of the war in 1945, survivors from concentration camps erected a memorial to commemorate the Jews who had perished during the Nazi era. The cemetery is occupied to the present day.

The whole complex is designed like a park and comprises around 20,000 m ³ with around 3,000 grave sites. Part of the site cannot be used because Russian and Polish forced laborers were buried there without any identification during the Second World War.