An Austrian couple from Vienna has bought a 19th century Jewish gravestone they saw advertised online and have returned it to an Austrian Jewish community.
According to the Heute news site, the couple purchased the gravestone of one Lev Unger, who died in 1884, for €275.
The couple, identified as 35-year-old Katharina B., a Christian political scientist, and her husband, saw an ad for the stone on an online site for used goods. It was described as a “very heavy” but “beautiful” stone, with “unknown writing” — “(Gravestone??????)” the ad guessed.
The couple picked up the stone from the seller, who was not named in the article, near the town of Feldbach, about 150 km south of Vienna. He said he had acquired it from a gravedigger years earlier and had kept it in his woodshed.
The couple took the stone Graz and handed it over to the president of the Graz Jewish community, Elie Rosen. It will be kept in the Graz Jewish cemetery — until, if possible, it can be determined where the stone was originally located.
“Of course we want to return the grave stone to the cemetery from which it disappeared. But making inquiries is difficult,” Rosen told Heute.
Anyone having information about a Lev Unger who died in 1884 is asked to contact either the Jewish community in Graz — [email protected] — or the reporter who wrote the story for Heute — [email protected] .
Read the full story in Heute (in German)