A century of change
The stones move from traditional Hebrew to classical German to Art Nouveau.
Barbara Maliszewska — CC BY-SA 3.0 pl · Barbara Maliszewska — CC BY-SA 3.0 pl · Barbara Maliszewska — CC BY-SA 3.0 pl · Barbara Maliszewska — CC BY-SA 3.0 pl
This is a cemetery and retains its sanctity even though burials have ceased. Men are asked to cover their heads, dress covering shoulders and knees is asked of everyone, and voices should be low. Flowers are not placed on Jewish graves; small stones are — if you see pebbles on the headstones, that is the custom. Photography is normally permitted but should not be staged.
A Jewish philosopher born in Breslau in 1891, who studied phenomenology under Edmund Husserl, then converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. She was deported to Auschwitz and killed there in 1942. The Catholic Church canonised her in 1998, and she is a complex figure remembered in Wrocław as among the most notable people the city produced.
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The Old Jewish Cemetery of Wrocław, in use between 1856 and 1942, today a branch of the city museum run as an open-air museum of funerary art. What makes it exceptional is that it survived. Jewish cemeteries in Germany were largely destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s; this one remained — neglected for decades after the war, then restored and opened in 1991. The headstones themselves are the exhibit: nineteenth-century monuments in styles that track the changes in Breslau's Jewish community — from traditional Hebrew inscriptions to neo-classical monuments in German, and then to Art Nouveau. The cemetery reads as a document of integration, change and identity across a century. Buried here are Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the German socialist movement, relatives of Edith Stein's family, and the city's scholars, merchants and physicians. This is a cemetery before it is a museum: quiet and respectful dress are asked, and men are asked to cover their heads.
The stones move from traditional Hebrew to classical German to Art Nouveau.
The founder of the German socialist movement is buried here.
Many Jewish cemeteries in Germany were destroyed; this was neglected, then restored.
Ślężna street, south of central Wrocław