project information

The history of the Jewish cemetery in Darmstadt begins with the final establishment of the Darmstadt Jewish community at the beginning of the 18th century. At the instigation of the court Jew David, a Jewish cemetery was established on the eastern edge of the village of Bessungen, which was closely linked to the residence, with the cemetery being used from 1709. The founding statutes of the Darmstadt burial brotherhood date from 1710.

In 1980, the "Kommission für die Geschichte der Juden in Hessen“ (Commission for the History of the Jews in Hesse) began an inventory of selected Jewish cemeteries. In 1981, the Judaist Benno Szklanowski was commissioned to document the oldest gravestones of the Jewish cemetery of Darmstadt-Bessungen, whose gravestones date back to 1714. Szklanowski's documentation was delimited upwards with the year 1848, because since that time other sources were available to a greater extent and the later gravestones were increasingly inscribed with German texts. Nevertheless, in order to counteract further weathering processes, a complete digital recording of the entire cemetery should be envisaged in the foreseeable future.

Szklanowski's documentation, including the linking of his findings with the available archival sources, was published in book form in 1988 by Justus von Liebig Verlag Darmstadt under the title "Haus des ewigen Lebens. Beit Hachajim. Der jüdische Friedhof in Darmstadt. Grabstätten von 1714-1848“. In 2022 the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute, Essen, transferred this documentation from the book form - corrected and supplemented - to the electronic database epidat. (The tomb marked with No. 33a in the book publication appears in epidat under 3300, correspondingly 49a under 4900).

The photos of Darmstadt will be added later.

editor

• Annette Sommer

image documentation