Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee

Jewish Cemetery
This cemetery, which today is a protected historic site, was consecrated in 1880. There are 115,000 grave plots on this site encompassing 42 hectares in all. The intricate pathways divide the site into 120 cemetery tracts. The main pathways and smaller walkways are bordered by trees. Along the main pathways and honor rows are monumental gravestones of Jewish citizens of Berlin. The burial architecture bears witness to the self-conception of Jewish bourgeois life at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Structures at the entrances and mortuary chapel were built according to designs by architect Hugo Licht (1841-1923). The memorial in the entrance area, completed in 1992, commemorates the six million European Jews murdered between 1933 and 1945. In Berlin alone, among the 160,000 Jews who lived there during that time, 55,000 were murdered. There are over 1,650 Jews buried in this cemetery who out of desperation ended their own lives during the Nazi dictatorship. The special urn tract (Section 7) created in 1941 contains the ashes of 283 Jews murdered in concentration camps. The names of other victims were added to gravestones by their relatives. Near the second cemetery entrance on the Indira-Gandhi-Strasse, created in 1924 but closed off today, there is a field of honor dating back to 1914, dedicated to the 12,000 Jewish soldiers (3,500 from Berlin) who fell in World War I. In the cemetery are buried the remains of more than 500 soldiers, including 395 on the field of honor, who either died in the war or as a result of war injuries. There is a three-meter high "commemorative altar", created in coquina limestone by local master builder Alexander Beer (1873-1944) and consecrated in 1927 by Rabbi Leo Baeck (1873-1956). The German Army, the Bundeswehr, cares for the memorial regularly and honors these fallen soldiers with a ceremony on Remembrance Day. The 750 meter long cemetery wall along Indira-Gandhi-Strasse, made of pre-fab concrete slabs with menorah motifs, was erected in 1983/84 according to plans by architect Gerd Pieper. Since 1961 the Cemetery of Weissensee has also been the resting place for gravestones of the abandoned Jewish cemetery of Köpenick. The street leading to the cemetery entrance is named after Herbert Baum (1912-1942), the German-Jewish resistance fighter against National Socialism. On the cemetery, there is an honor gravesite dedicated to him by the State of Berlin, along with the 27 murdered members of the Herbert Baum resistance group. The square at the main entrance bears the name of the Jewish educator, Markus Reich (1844-1911), the founder of the Israelite deaf-mute institution.

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• http://jewish-cemetery-weissensee.org/wp/