A (very) longterm research project to document Jewish cemeteries in Germany is getting underway.
Over the course of the coming two decades and more, researchers from North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria will be documenting 35 selected Jewish cemeteries in great detail, as part of the project called “Stone Witnesses Digital – German-Jewish Sepulchral Culture between the Middle Ages and Modern Times – Space, Form, Inscription.”
Sponsored by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts as part of the Academy Program funded by the federal and state governments, the project is being carried out by the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History at the University of Duisburg-Essen in collaboration with the Professorship of Jewish Studies and the Competence Center for Monument Studies and Monument Technologies at the University of Bamberg.
The three project leaders are Steinheim Institute Director Lucia Raspe; University of Bamberg Professor for Digital Monument technologies Mona Hess; and University of Bamberg Jewish Studies Professor Susanne Talabardon.
“The interdisciplinary basis of the project, in which digital monument technologies play a key role alongside Jewish studies and building research, enables new research questions and perspectives on Jewish life beyond the major centers,” an announcement of the project states. “Despite and because of the loss of many written and architectural documents, the aim is to make the final resting places of Jews accessible as witnesses to centuries of coexistence between majority and minority.”
Though the project was initiated last year, its official kickoff will come next week at an international conference at the Steinheim Institute, called Jewish Cemeteries in Premodern Europe: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
More than 2,000 Jewish cemeteries survive in Germany, ranging from Europe’s oldest Jewish cemetery in situ, the “Holy Sands” cemetery in Worms, to small village cemeteries, to vast urban cemeteries from the 19th and 20th centuries still in use today.
The “Stone Witnesses Digital” project will focus on cemeteries dating from the early modern period to the 20th century, targeting 35 selected Jewish cemeteries from all over the country; they comprise a total of some 33,600 gravestones and more than 19,000 inscriptions.
The project is due to extend for 24 years — lasting until the year 2046; JHE was informed that the funding amounted to at least €120,000 a year.
“The funding makes it possible to provide several academic positions over the course of the project and to ensure the training of the next generation in this area through qualification positions and teaching,” an announcement of the project stated.
The cemeteries that will be documented have been divided into three clusters based on location, time-period, and history. Cluster 1, which lasts for 12 years, focuses on rural Jewish cemeteries that were established after the expulsion of Jews from urban areas in the 15th century. Cluster 2, which will last six years, deals with urban cemeteries newly established from the mid-17th century after the 30 Years War. Cluster 3, also to last for six years, will deal with cemeteries founded in the Enlightenment period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Organizers have said that one of the cemeteries to be documented in Cluster 3 will be Berlin’s Grosse Hamburgerstrasse cemetery. The oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin, it functioned from 1672 to 1827. It was destroyed by the Nazis and today is a memorial site. But 2,767 gravestones were inventoried when the cemetery was closed in 1827.
In addition to documenting the inscriptions, the team will record the geographical conditions of the cemeteries, structural features such as the material used for the stones, the formal language and design of the stones, the state of preservation, and the arrangement of the gravestones. The results will be published as a digital text and image corpus.
A description of the project states that
a representative digital text and image corpus will be created, documented and sustainably archived. This data will be combined with the digital recording of spatial and structural characteristics and detailed topographical relationships. As a result, a representative, interdisciplinary, multimodal data set will be created and permanently secured. On this basis, the grave inscriptions, gravestone designs and spatial relationships within the cemeteries can be systematically analysed both diachronically and synchronously for the first time. The results will be made accessible to the public for further scientific research.
A web site for the project is under construction.