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A look at the old Jewish cemetery in Bremen
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I stayed at the nearby Jewish cemetery for an hour and a half. The cemetery is surrounded by tenements and is connected with the street only by a long narrow passage. There you see many hundred graves among the shades of tall trees. Jewish graves don't expire. That's why they enable us to comprehend the development of the Jewish community in Bremen. The oldest tombstones, the inscriptions of which I was able to decipher, date back to the 19th century. There may be older inscriptions which I didn't notice or which I wasn't able to decipher.
It's conspicious that there are only few graves from the perod between 1940 and 1990. The reason therefore lays in the fact that as from 1940 the Nazis systematically persecuted, deported and murdered Jews also in Bremen.So, in this period, there were very few Jews, who had a chance to live and to get an honorable burial in Bremen after they had died.
But there are memorial inscriptions on infrequent tombstones. They indicate that relatives were deported to Eastern Europe and were murdered e.g. in Minsk or Sobibor.
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Other inscriptions reveal that one of the two spouses was burried in Bremen in the thirties and the other one obviously emigrated and was burried e.g. in England in 1945 or in United States in 1948. I was told that also people who had been murdered in the Pogrom Night were burried at the cemetery wall. In front of an other part of the cemetery wall there is a memorial the inscription of which puts the number of the victims of the Nazi racism at 915.
It's also conspicious that as from nineties a great many tombstones with Russian names were added. There are infrequent tombstones with only or almost only Cyrillic letters. Many jews emigrated from the former Eastern bloc and escpecially from the former Soviet Union likewise to Bremen. By reference of those deaths which are documented with tombstones one may estimate the dimension of this migration movement.
I'll certainly go to see this cemetery soon again, because, besides the above- mentioned information about the great lines of history, it reveals many details.
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Please also read
- Charlie Dittmeier's report on seventh-day funeral ceremony for a student in the Cambodian Kampot province .
- Revisited - The Old Jewish Cemetery in Bremen
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Next issue 'The Daily Groove'
Tuesday, November 30 2010.
I am preparing a special issue.
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We would like to point out that we translated articles from German into English for the purpose of service. We would like to make it clear that the German translations are deciding, because the articles are directed to users who live in Germany.
Wir möchten darauf hinweisen, dass wir zu Servicezwecken englische Übersetzungen vorgenommen haben. Klarstellen möchten wir, dass maßgeblich die deutsche Übersetzung ist. Grund dessen ist, dass wir uns an in Deutschland ansässige Nutzer wenden.
Please also read Cats Talk (48)
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