Cemeteries | The Jews in Mecklenburg

The grave of a deceased person holds one of the highest religious significances in Judaism. According to Jewish rite, it belongs to the dead, is inviolable, and is meant for eternity.

In Mecklenburg, too, there was a Jewish cemetery in nearly every town. Out of the sheer necessity of having to bury the dead, the towns permitted their Jewish communities very early on to lease or purchase plots of land specifically for this purpose. These plots, however, were not infrequently located outside the town boundaries.

As far as the first phase of Jewish settlement in Mecklenburg is concerned, at best only vague accounts of the cemeteries of that time have been passed down. Most Jewish cemeteries of the second settlement phase were established at the beginning of or even not until the middle of the 19th century. Since the settlement of the Schutzjuden in most Mecklenburg towns had already occurred around the middle of the 18th century, the question inevitably arises as to where in the meantime the Jewish dead were actually buried. Based on the current state of research, this question cannot in fact be clearly answered for every town. Possibly, burials took place in neighboring communities that already had their own cemetery, or perhaps the knowledge of earlier cemeteries in the town has simply been lost.

Jewish cemeteries were repeatedly targeted by racially motivated desecrations, and this well before the rise of National Socialism. Desecrations are documented as early as 1806 in Parchim, 1854 in Sternberg, and in the 1920s in Gnoien, Kroepelin, and Bruel.

During the "Reichskristallnacht" on November 9-10, 1938, alongside the synagogues, the Jewish cemeteries were also devastated: gravestones were defaced, toppled, or destroyed, and in some cases even the mortal remains were not left untouched. Thus, at least 13 Jewish cemeteries in Mecklenburg were desecrated during the Nazi era. But even after the fall of the Third Reich, the dead were not granted peace: Both during the GDR era, particularly in the 1980s, and after reunification, defacements and destruction occurred repeatedly.

Most of the Jewish cemeteries still preserved today are for this reason mere memorials without actual grave holdings. Very few survived the times as actual cemeteries, among them Teterow, Bruel, Plau, and Luebz. They still reflect today the former Jewish side of Mecklenburg's towns.

That much further information and photographs of the former holdings of Jewish cemeteries in Mecklenburg have been preserved is due above all to the former Goldberg pastor Gerhard Voss, who conducted an inventory of the still-existing cemeteries in 1987. A similarly valuable inventory of the cemeteries and grave monuments was carried out after reunification by the Association for Jewish History and Culture in Mecklenburg and Vorpommern under the leadership of Norbert Francke and Baerbel Krieger.
Also recommended in this context is a visit to the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern section of the Alemannia Judaica project of the Working Group for Research into the History of Jews in the South German and Neighboring Regions.

By Gramenz, Jürgen / Ulmer, Sylvia (created: Sep 20, 2015)