Find­ing the Jew­ish Cemetery Weißensee wasn’t easy. The grave­yard being tucked away behind the composers’s neigh­bour­hood of South Weißensee, it took a map guided walk through calm and neat streets with lovely names such as Puccin­is­traße, Mahler­straße and the like. A big lux­uri­ant gate sat on the end of the street and announced the dig­nity and grandeur of Jew­ish burial cul­ture that the humble vis­itor was about to experience.

I had a sketchy idea about what this would look like: The Jew­ish Cemetery Weißensee was recently put on a list of future applic­ants for the UNESCO World Cul­tural Her­it­age. Given it’s size of 115.000 graves on an area of 42 hec­tare, it’s Europe’s biggest Jew­ish grave­yard. The old­est tombs date back to 1880, when the cemetery was foun­ded as Berlin’s heav­ily grow­ing Jew­ish com­munity needed more space for their parish­ion­ers. Over the dec­ades, many fam­il­ies bur­ied their dead here – most in ordin­ary, but still dig­ni­fied graves and quite a few in splen­did fam­ily mausolea. Many of them were still vis­ible, mak­ing a walk through the rows of graves a walk through history.

I have a some­what pecu­liar interest in his­tor­ical grave­yards, espe­cially dur­ing late spring and autumn, when old and beau­ti­ful cemeter­ies such as Beth­le­hem­skirchof at Kreuberg’s Blüch­er­straße turn into tran­quil places full of his­tory and cul­ture, where the birds chirp in the birches and few vis­it­ors come to see the mag­ni­fi­cent graves and mausolea.

The Jew­ish Cemetery Weißensee was said to exceed other his­tor­ical grave­yards not only in size, but also in splend­our. Being more of a forest cemetery, it would surely proof to be one-of-a-kind place. I had to see it.

To Jews, cemeter­ies are holy grounds. The com­munity requires every male vis­itor to put on head­dress and kindly offers kippah’s to those how for­got to bring a hat. I put on one of those and ever since than struggled with the wind blow­ing through the trees and, much to my embar­rass­ment, my kip­pah away. I set off to immerse into cot­ton­wood forest and then, there it was: this usual notion of being isol­ated from the frantic city, the silent and grave atmo­sphere of cen­tury old cemeter­ies such as this par­tic­u­lar and quite spe­cial one.

There was more green than I expec­ted: Many of the crooked grave­stones, that bore Hebrew epi­graphs, were over­grown with big ferns and dense lay­ers of ivy. Trees would rise from nearly every­where, the graves and nar­row path not­with­stand­ing. Some tomb­stones were broken and I wondered if these were the wretched rem­nants of anti-Semitic acts of van­dal­ism. Unlike Chris­tian cemeter­ies, no flowers adorned the graves; vis­it­ors put pebbles on the tomb­stones here and there, a fash­ion quite com­mon for Jew­ish mourn­ing cul­ture. Later on, I read that Jew­ish graves wait for Judge­ment Day – that explained why the graves were in such shape.

How­ever, there were also the prom­ised mausolea – not only few, there were quite many. Big ones, exceed­ing everything I knew from typ­ical Chris­tian cemeter­ies. Marble, sand­stone and gran­ite, del­ic­ate pil­lars with lav­ish cap­it­als, sprawl­ing entab­la­tures and some­times even domes con­trib­uted to pom­pous sepulchral structures.

I wondered how this place rich of Jew­ish cul­ture could sur­vive anti-Semitic and Holo­caust times both before and dur­ing the Third Reich. I learned that many graves date back to the Nazi era, most of them for com­munity mem­bers who com­mit­ted sui­cide. Almost two thou­sand of the here bur­ied people took their own lifes dur­ing the Nazi reign, in sheer fear of pur­suit and deport­a­tion. Another eight hun­dred graves mourn those whose ashes were brought from con­cen­tra­tion camps. The fig­ures for the murdered vic­tims, who weren’t bur­ied here because their bod­ies or ashes were never retrieved, but received a grave any­way so their fam­il­ies received a place to grieve for them, are said to be much higher. Uncoun­ted other Jews were illeg­ally and undoc­u­mentedly bur­ied here dur­ing the last months of the Nazi reign. The war did it’s dam­ages, too, leav­ing the big­ger build­ings in ruins.

After the Lib­er­a­tion, the fate of the Jew­ish Cemetery Weißensee did not brighten up. The dis­trict fell under Soviet, then East Ger­man rule which ignored the cemetery, sup­posedly because Jew­ish life was wiped out then. Few but unswerving people strived for the pre­ser­va­tion and recon­struc­tion of the grave­yard, until more then twenty years after the Nazi era ended the site was put a “pre­ser­va­tion order of cul­tural his­tory” on. But the Jew­ish cemetery was at stake once again in the mid-eighties when an import­ant high­way was planned to span over the grave­yard. It was planned to go over a strip of land that was con­ceived as a pas­sage from the begin­ning but never saw any traffic. Dur­ing the tur­moil of war, many anonym­ous Jews were bur­ied here, ren­der­ing it holy ground to stay untouched. It was due to the effort of the chair­man of the Cent­ral Coun­cil of Jews in Ger­many, that State Coun­cil chair­man Erich Honecker dropped the plan, thus sav­ing the cemetery.

Today, the empty pub­lic cof­fers don’t allow the pre­ser­va­tion and main­ten­ance for the heritage-protected Jew­ish Cemetery. Cost­ing about forty mil­lion Euros, both the Jew­ish com­munity and the city can­not afford the res­tor­a­tion and main­ten­ance of the grave­yard. They pro­posed to apply for UNESCO World Cul­tural Her­it­age in order to obtain the funds needed. Let’s hope they suc­ceed and the Jew­ish Cemetery Weißensee can retain its silent and grave atmo­sphere and become a centre of Jew­ish life again.