The Old Jewish Cemetery & Moses Mendelssohn
Why is it significant?
Stop at the low wall of Große Hamburger Straße 26 and look through to a green space shaded by old trees, its ground carpeted with ivy, only a few gravestones standing. On the pavement in front, a group of gaunt bronze figures, women and children, stands huddled together.
Key Facts
| Place | The Old Jewish Cemetery & Moses Mendelssohn |
|---|---|
| Address | Große Hamburger Straße 26, 10115 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.52440, 13.39980 |
| Part of Walk | Golden Dome, Missing House: Jewish Berlin & the Scheunenviertel |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop at the low wall of Große Hamburger Straße 26 and look through to a green space shaded by old trees, its ground carpeted with ivy, only a few gravestones standing. On the pavement in front, a group of gaunt bronze figures, women and children, stands huddled together.
This was the first cemetery of Berlin's new Jewish community, opened in 1672, barely a year after the first families arrived, and used until 1827. Thousands of people were buried here. The most famous of them is Moses Mendelssohn. He came to Berlin in 1743 as a poor fourteen-year-old boy, entering, the story goes, through the Rosenthaler Tor, the one gate Jews were allowed to use, where they had to pay a toll like livestock... and he became one of the most admired philosophers of the German Enlightenment.
His friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing modelled the hero of Nathan the Wise on him, the play that pleads for tolerance between Jews, Christians and Muslims. Mendelssohn translated the Five Books of Moses into German, printed in Hebrew letters, to lead his community into German culture without leaving its faith. His gravestone here is a copy; the original was destroyed. The building next door was the Jewish boys' school, and today it is a Jewish secondary school bearing his name.
In 1943 the Gestapo had the cemetery destroyed. Next to it stood the Jewish old people's home, and from 1942 the Gestapo turned it into a collection camp. Many thousands of Berlin Jews were held in its rooms before being loaded onto the trains, to Theresienstadt, to Auschwitz. The bronze group in front, by the sculptor Will Lammert, stands for them.
It is Jewish custom to leave a small stone on a grave rather than flowers, and you will often see pebbles resting on Mendelssohn's stone. Then cross the street and walk a little way north, to a gap between two houses where there is nothing to see at all... which is exactly what you need to see.