Baai2Berlin: Oldest Jewish Cemetery in Berlin

While there is sunshine in Berlin, I decided to just wander the streets and take pictures of interesting buildings. I came across this Jewish cemetery in Große Hamburger Straße. This is the oldest of Berlin's Jewish cemeteries, in use between 1672 and 1827. It was destroyed in WW2.

The first thing you see is a sculpture of a group of figures depicting hollow-eyed, emaciated adults and children. Obviously a reference to suffering.

Apparently the first Jewish home for the aged and a Jewish school for boys were erected right across and next to the cemetery. While the Nazi's were in power, these building were converted into internment centres from where Jews were transported to extermination camps. Apparently about 55000 Jews were deported from this site.

The cemetery is now a peaceful open garden

In I943 the cemetery was destroyed on orders of the Gestapo. The demolished gravestones were used to reinforce the walls of air raid shelters built on top of the cemetery.

In the 1980s, the GDR removed the remaining Jewish gravestones and the wooden crosses that marked the mass graves for soldiers and civilians killed during Allied air raids. Apparently about 3000 war victims were buried here.

A symbolic grave of Moses Mendelssohn (a Jewish German philosopher that lived in the 1700s. I think the concrete part behind the gravestone is a sarcophagus filled with destroyed gravestones

Note the stones on top of the grave stones. It's apparently a Jewish custom similar to leaving flowers. You place the stones with your left hand. This custom might have had its origins in the millennia before gravestones existed. Then a heap of rocks indicated that a person was buried there.