Obj. ID: 51128  Holocaust Monument in Pinelines 2 Jewish Cemetery in Cape Town, South Africa, 1970s(?)

Memorial Name

No officail name 

Who is Commemorated?

Jewish victims of the Holocaust

Description:

The memorial is situated at the left, eastern side of the entrance to the cemetery chapel, while at the right stands a memorial to “young Jewish men & women from the Western Cape who made the supreme sacrifice during various world & Israeli conflicts of the 20th century” (see here).

The memorial is situated in a Star of David frame and its footprint is also six-pointed. The memorial consists of six triangular concrete pillars of different height with slanting tops. The pillars look like “made” of slanting triangular blocks with height of about 50 cm: the lower pillar has two such blocks and the upper one – seven.

The lowest pillar bear on its top a dedicatory inscription on a metal sheet with a Star of David in its bottom. Five other pillars feature names of the death camps on the interior side of their upper blocks: Belzec, Dachau, Belsen, Treblinka and Auschwitz on the highest one.

The pillar inscribed “Belsen” bears a trapezoid plaque with two columns of names of camps and killing sites arranged alphabetically: it starts in the lower right corner to the upper right and then from the lower left corner to the upper left one. It seems that this plaque was installed later.

The hexagon made by the pillars is empty.

Inscriptions

On the small pillar, English:

To the eternal memory of the
victims of the Nazi Holocaust
“For these I weep, streams of
tears flow from my eyes,
because of the destruction
of my people”
(Lamentations)

[The verse is Lamentations 1:16]

On the small pillar, Hebrew:

לזכרון
על אלה אני בוכיה
פלגי מים תרד עיני
על שבר בת עמי
(איכה)

Translation: For memory. For these I weep, streams of tears flow from my eyes, because of the destruction of my people (Lamentations) [Lamentations 1:16]

On the upper parts of the pillars (clockwise):

Belzec

Dachau

Belsen

Treblinka

Auschwitz

On a trapezoid plaque on the pillar inscribed “Belsen”:

Vaivara, Treblinka, Stutthof, Sobibor, Sajmiste, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Plaszow, Nauengamme, Natzweiler, Mathausen, Majdanek

Klooga, Jasenovac, Gross Rosen, Flossenbürg, Dora-Mittelbau, Dachau, Chelmno, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Belzec, Babri-Yar, Auschwitz

Commissioned by

Jewish community of Cape Town (?)