Christian Herrmann, on his Vanished World blog, reports on remnants of a Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi (Czernowitz) Ukraine that predates the vast cemetery that still exists there.
Today’s Jewish cemetery was established in 1866. In the same year the old cemetery, located in the west of the Jewish district – near the train station – was closed. In 1949, the site was handed over by the Soviet authorities to a textile factory, which largely destroyed the cemetery. Parts of the grave stones were then misused as construction material. But individual graves can still be found in the ground.
He writes that examination of the site — which includes a wall made of gravestones — has been thwarted by the management of the textile factory, which has denied access.
2 comments on “Forgotten old Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi found”
My paternal grandfather Mordche Marcus Turtel lived in Cernowitz at Gerbergasee number 3. Beyond the fence there was the old jewish cemetery. As a child of almost 5 years old (after returning from Transnistria) I was atanding there every day and looking at the trees there.
Luckily, some tombstones of that cemetery were photographed, described, and published in the book: Max Diamant, Juedische Volkskunst (Vienna and Jerusalem, 1937).