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Gravestones from the 1840s and 1850s.
Please click on the stones to learn
about those buried here. |
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The earliest burial on record dates back to
1781. At that time the Jewish cemetery was situated outside the village
right on the border of the Baron's tiny territory, not far from the gallows.
Today
the village has grown all around it. Some of the old gravestones are lost,
and on many others the inscriptions are hardly readable. However, those
buried on the newer part and many of those laid to rest on the older part
of the cemetery can still be identified.
The Tahara house, where the dead were laid out
and taken care of by members of the Burial Society before being interred,
is no longer extant.
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Gravestones from the early 20th century
Gravestone of Milton Rohrbacher,
1876 - 1883 |
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In the early days the dead were buried as
soon as possible - usually on the day they had died. Gravestones bore inscriptions
in Hebrew only, and their decorations, if any, were most inobtrusive. The
Hebrew inscriptions eulogized the piety and other qualities of the deceased,
sometimes in a rather standardized way but often with a personal note.
On the newer part of the cemetery Hebrew inscriptions
are increasingly rare, and German eulogies take their place. While the
more recent epitaphs tell less about the personal qualities and the fates
of the deceased but are largely reduced to standard formula, the monuments
now tend to testify to their economic strength and social standing.
At the time of the decline of Jebenhausen's Jewish
community the cemetery was used jointly with the community in Goeppingen,
where a Jewish cemetery was inaugurated in 1903 only.
The last burial of a Jewish resident of Jebenhausen
was that of Max
Lauchheimer in May 1939.
A list of those buried on the cemetery
will be available shortly.
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