Obj. ID: 53530
  Funerary Art  Jewish cemetery at Große Hamburger St. in Berlin, Germany

This is the oldest of Berlin’s Jewish cemeteries and was in use between 1672 and 1827. The first 50 Jewish families entitled to live in Berlin, 100 years after the last expulsion, established the cemetery.

Berlin’s first Jewish home for the aged was erected in a building just across from the cemetery. The Jewish School for Boys was located in the adjacent property. During the National Socialist period, the Gestapo confiscated both buildings and converted them into internment centres or “Judenlager,” prisons holding Jews before their deportation. In 1943, the Jewish cemetery was destroyed on orders of the Gestapo. The Nazis desecrated the graves and turned the entire grounds into air raid shelters, the walls of which were reinforced with demolished gravestones. In April 1945, the authorities used the grounds as a mass grave for soldiers and civilians killed during Allied air raids. In the 1970s, East Berlin’s Department of Parks and Gardens removed the remaining Jewish gravestones as well as the wooden crosses marking the graves of air raid victims. Today, a symbolic tombstone in honor of Moses Mendelssohn and a sarcophagus filled with destroyed gravestones are the only physical remains of the cemetery. Approximately 3,000 war victims (only 2,000 are known by name) were buried there alongside approximately 3,000 Jewish dead. [Jewish community of Berlin]