Jewish cemetery (Oldenburg)

The Jewish cemetery in Oldenburg was occupied by around 300 grave sites from 1814 to 2014. In the background the mourning hall from 1921.

Memorial stone for Soviet war victims

In the well-preserved Jewish cemetery on Dedestrasse in Oldenburg (Oldenburg) in Lower Saxony , Germany , there are around 300 graves from the years 1814 to 2014.

In addition, between 1941 and 1943, 56 people of Russian, Ukrainian and Polish citizenship ( prisoners of war and civilians ) were buried in the cemetery.

history

The Jewish community of Oldenburg was allowed to have its own cemetery in Easter castle in 1814 - at that time a rural community at the gates of Oldenburg. The first funeral took place in the same year. Jews from Zwischenahn , Elsfleth and Wardenburg were also buried in the cemetery. In 1862 the cemetery was enlarged considerably. To build a cemetery wall, the government approved a loan in 1866.

The merchant Leo (Leiser) Trommer donated a mourning hall to commemorate his son, who died in 1918 , which was ceremonially opened on May 1, 1921. The architect was Dr. Ing.Heinrich Biebel. The large round stained glass window came from Georg Karl Rohde from Bremen. During the November pogroms of 1938 , on the morning of November 10, attempts were unsuccessful to set them on fire. However, the inventory was demolished and burned. Two suspects were prosecuted for the crime in 1949. They were sentenced to one year and nine months and one year in prison, respectively , for crimes against humanity .

The gravesites of the Land (es) - Rabbis Bernhard Wechsler , David Mannheimer and Philipp de Haas are located in the cemetery .

The cemetery fell into disrepair during the Second World War . A mass grave for 56 prisoners of war and slave labor was laid on it; A memorial stone reminds of their fate; it was built between 1949 and 1951. After the end of the war, the cemetery grounds were restored. In 1951 the mourning hall was repaired and restored in 1974. An air raid shelter (round protection structure with a diameter of 6 meters) built on the site in 1943 was only removed again in March 1960. The cemetery was closed in 2000 and a new Jewish cemetery was created in the municipal park cemetery in Oldenburg- Kreyenbrück . In some cases, however, burials were carried out in the old cemetery until 2014.

Desecrations since 2000

The cemetery was desecrated on June 15, 2000, September 26, 2003 and March 11, 2004 . It was politically motivated crime from the right spectrum ('PMK-right'). Gravestones were damaged during the desecration on March 11, 2004. On May 29, 2010 the cemetery wall was smeared with graffiti.

The Jewish cemetery was desecrated again on November 19, 2011: 6 gravestones were thrown over the cemetery wall with white paint. A police officer who happened to pass by followed the perpetrators and was injured with pepper spray. In November 2012, a 21-year-old was sentenced by the youth lay judge at the Oldenburg district court to a two-year suspended sentence for disturbing the peace of the dead and assaulting the dead.

The cemetery was desecrated again on the night of November 23rd to 24th, 2013. This time 8 graves were smeared with swastikas. The mourning hall was also smeared with 3 swastikas and the words "Jew". The perpetrators were sentenced in April 2016 to six and five months' imprisonment and another perpetrator to a fine of € 3,000.

In the summer of 2014, the cemetery wall was sprayed with the digits “88”, an abbreviation for Heil Hitler that is common in the right-wing extremist scene .

On February 14, 2015, unconstitutional symbols were again smeared on pillars in the entrance area, as well as on a wall and two cars nearby.

In June 2016 the cemetery wall in Dragonerstraße was smeared with graffiti in white paint.

literature

Oldenburg. In: Johannes-Fritz Töllner: The Jewish cemeteries in the Oldenburger Land. Inventory of the preserved tombstones. (Oldenburger Studien 25), Oldenburg 1983, pp. 356–487 (therein: history, photos and inscriptions); ISBN 3-87358-181-7
Werner Meiners : Oldenburg In: Herbert Obenaus (Ed. In collaboration with David Bankier and Daniel Fraenkel): Historical manual of the Jewish communities in Lower Saxony and Bremen . Volume 1 and 2 (1668 pp.), Göttingen 2005, pp. 1172–1196 (with 5 illustrations)
Matthias Schachtschneider: Easter Castle. A place with many faces , Oldenburg 1999, pp. 237–240
Ulrich Knufinke: Buildings of Jewish cemeteries in Germany (= series of publications by the Bet-Tfila Research Center for Jewish Architecture in Europe 3), p. 265 f. Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2007, ISBN 978-3-86568-206-2 (also: Braunschweig, Technical University, dissertation, 2005).