It is an unassuming place that falls in passing at best through the trees and bushes between the rows of houses pass into the eye. It is only when you look over the wall and shows to what a property is: a Plurality of rows of grave stones we find on the little more than 500 square meters large Area on a main road at the southern edge of the city, some weathered quite a bit, so that the inscriptions are barely visible, others in better condition. Those who look closer, on the grave of a variety of Hebrew inscriptions painting discovered in addition to information about the deceased in German. It is the old Jewish cemetery in Bad Nauheim, until the beginning of the 20th century. Century was used.
tungsten Ahlers
correspondent of the Rhine-Main newspaper for Central Hesse and the Wetterau.
F. A. Z.
The burial place to make known and to call the Buried back into the memory, had made the “homeland researcher” Thomas Schwab to the task. It resulted in a publication that documented the extent the left still reconstruct all of the graves in the picture and the Text, the short biographies of the deceased attached.
get 300 victims from anonymity
It was not the first Time that Schwab has dealt with former Jewish citizens of Bad Nauheim. Especially with his research on the new memorial for the victims of the Holocaust, the retired physician and Amateur had contributed historians that nearly 300 victim could identify that were brought with the memorial in the Spa gardens from the anonymity. Now it went to Schwab to deal with parents and grandparents of the victims of the Holocaust, as he says. They lived at a time when Jewish life in the city got a boost. What went hand in hand with the rise of the city in to a prosperous resort town ends. At that time, Jewish physicians and Hoteliers were in the middle of the society, many Jews from abroad came to the Spa at Bad Nauheim, for the there were even on-site facilities. The Jewish community numbered immediately to the larger of the Region, what it is in the Rest of today.
The “hidden gem,” as Schwab called the old Jewish cemetery, to authorize, so to speak, the inventory turned out to be a costly undertaking, although it was only a few dozen grave sites. About the cemetery itself, Schwab found, in his words, nothing in Writing. And thus also nothing about the buried there.
a Translation of the inscriptions was a particularly difficult
So he searched the death registers, other documents found in state archives, other entries had kept in the city archives. Which at least in the short biographies were reconstructed. As a particularly difficult employment was with the inscriptions. Because in the headstones carved in Hebrew not more often corresponds to the current, as Schwab explains. With the result that first of all, he asked, the inscriptions only partially read and translate could. Finally, Schwab found in the Neu-Isenburg pastor Lothar Tetzner one skilled in the art, the anxious, the Translations that are to be found in the publication, in addition to the original texts. Managed Schwab at the end, to describe 50 graves.
The oldest is from 1866, the youngest of 1901, shortly before a larger Jewish cemetery on the site next to the Christian cemetery was established a few hundred meters further on the outskirts. By 1939, there were about 250 Jewish graves, today there are just under 350. The old Jewish cemetery, but also had a predecessor.
