Sarajevo Jewish Cemetery

Gravestones in the cemetery

The cemetery around 1900

The Sarajevo Jewish Cemetery ( Bosnian Jevrejsko groblje u Sarajevu ) is located on the border of the Kovačići and Soukbunar districts of the Sarajevo-Centar municipality in the southwest of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo . The Sephardic cemetery is located on the slope of the Trebević above the Put Mladih Muslimana bypass road at the level of the parliament building and is one of the largest of its kind in Southeastern Europe .

The cemetery was founded in 1630 at the latest; the oldest preserved tombs - u. a. that of the first Sarajevo rabbi Samuel Baruh - date from this time. In the lower part of the cemetery there is a mourning hall. There are also monuments to the Sarajevo Jews who died in the Second World War and the Holocaust and the grave of the writer Isak Samokovlija (1889–1955) on the cemetery grounds . When the Bosnian Eastern Railway was built at the beginning of the 20th century, some graves in the lower part of the cemetery had to be reburied. Sarajevo's Jews have been buried in the city cemeteries since 1966.

During the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War , the cemetery was damaged due to its location between the mountain ranges held by the armed forces of the Bosnian Serbs and the besieged city. Numerous graves were damaged by shell hits and bullets, and the cemetery itself was mined. The mine clearance took place in 1998.

The cemetery has been a National Monument of Bosnia-Herzegovina since 2004 .