Jewish cemetery Weißensee

With more than 240 cemeteries, Berlin has probably the highest density of cemeteries in European metropolises. The Jewish Cemetery in Weißensee, a listed building, is today not only the most extensive inner-city burial ground in Berlin, but also the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe in terms of area, covering a good 43 hectares. However, it owes its unique significance not only to this fact and its artistically remarkable graves, but above all to the close connection with the fate of the Jewish citizens of Berlin. The cemetery in Weißensee is the resting place of men and women who have earned lasting merit through extraordinary achievements in medicine and other natural sciences and the humanities, the fine arts, literature and journalism, technology, industry and commerce, or local politics.

Around 1875/76, the Jewish Community of Berlin acquires an approximately 40-hectare site on Lothringenstraße (today Herbert-Baum-Straße) in Weißensee and, in the spring of 1878, announces a competition among the members of the Berlin Architects' Association for the design of the new cemetery. The competition was won by the architect Hugo Licht, who later became the city building councillor of Leipzig. In the following two years, the mourning hall, the mortuary and the office building at the entrance on Lothringenstraße are built from yellow brick according to Hugo Licht's design. The overall design with the 130 grave fields and the varied system of paths with the numerous squares also goes back to Hugo Licht's design.

On the Jewish Cemetery Weißensee, more than 115,000 people have found their final resting place since its inauguration on September 9, 1880. A Jewish cemetery is created for eternity, it is therefore also called Bet ha-olam, place of eternity.

As in hardly any other Berlin cemetery, one can follow the development of sepulchral art in Weißensee from 1880 to about 1939 by means of the most diverse and in part extraordinarily high-quality examples. Known are, among other things, often very elaborate grave designs of the architects Erdmann