Rüthen Jewish cemetery

The Jewish cemetery in Rüthen

The Jewish cemetery in Rüthen is probably the oldest preserved Jewish cemetery in Westphalia .

history

On October 8, 1625, the city ​​council of Rüthen gave the Jewish residents the moat below the city wall at the Hachtor as a burial place. There had probably been isolated Jewish burials there since the late Middle Ages . There is evidence of Jewish life in Rüthen for 1447, possibly as early as 1279. A permanent Jewish population group can be traced back to 1587. The Jewish community was destroyed during the National Socialist rule.

The year of origin of the cemetery was a plague year , which also meant more deaths than usual for the Jewish community. In the following centuries, generations of Jewish citizens of Rüthen, as well as foreign Jewish travelers who had died there, were buried there.

After the Holocaust , the cemetery became the property of the legal successor of the local Jewish community, the regional association of the Jewish communities of Westphalia-Lippe . The last burial took place in 1958. Since then, the cemetery has been orphaned or closed.

Of the previous 200 graves, 80 still exist today on an area of ​​1821 m². The authentic late medieval and early modern topography is remarkable, at least for North Rhine-Westphalia . The cemetery offers a variety of denominational, cultural and social historical references.

Online edition

As the first community in North Rhine-Westphalia, Rüthen, in cooperation with the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History in Essen, recorded the grave inscriptions and had them scientifically developed. A total of 80 gravestones from the Jewish cemetery in Rüthen and an additional four gravestones from Rüthen-Oestereiden are listed in the online edition .

Each tombstone is represented in the original edition, which can be supplemented at any time by new findings, with a description and a photo. Hebrew inscriptions are translated and annotated. There are also cross-references to other personalities belonging to the respective family as well as information about the person of the deceased. The database is under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license for Germany and is freely accessible.

literature

• Friedhelm Sommer: A stone archive with worldwide access. The online edition of the Jewish cemeteries in Rüthen . In: Sauerland. Journal of the Sauerländer Heimatbund 4/2009, pp. 175–177.

Web links

Commons : Jüdischer Friedhof (Rüthen)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Rüthen. In: Overview of all projects for the documentation of Jewish grave inscriptions in the area of ​​the Federal Republic of Germany. North Rhine-Westphalia.
• Digital edition: Rüthen Jewish cemetery (1654-1935 / 80 inscriptions)
• Presentation on the homepage of the city of Rüthen

Coordinates: 51 ° 29 ′ 37 "  N , 8 ° 25 ′ 57"  E