Jewish cemetery in Roßau

The Jewish cemetery Rossau, due to its location, also known as Jewish Cemetery Seegasse, is the oldest cemetery in Vienna. Here the members of the Jewish community were buried 1540-1783.

Location

The Jewish cemetery is located in the district Rossau part of the 9th district of Vienna, Alsergrund, and covers an area of about 2,000 m². Accessible he is about today's retirement home in Seegasse 9-11, he is in the yard. Instead of the pensioners home was formerly a Jewish hospice. The Seegasse was 1629 Gassel allwo the Jewish tomb from 1778 Jews Gasse, 1862 Seegasse after a formerly located here, mentioned in a document in 1415 as lake fish pond. ( The name of Jewish street was now, to avoid confusion of streets, reserved for centuries so designated transport area in the 1st district, which is to say until today. )

History

The Jewish cemetery in Seegasse was created in the 16th century. Between 1540 and 1783 he served as the principal burial place of members of the Jewish community. As there was a pogrom against the Jews of Vienna in 1670, deposited the Jewish merchant coupling Frankel 4000 guilders, whereupon the city undertook to preserve the Jewish cemetery. The Jewish cemetery continued to be used as a burial site in the sequence until 1783. 1703 Samuel Oppenheimer was buried here, in his time one of the major lenders of Austria, in 1724 the religious scholars and financier Samson Wertheimer.

1783 Joseph II forbade the use of cemeteries within the Linienwall. Instead, a new cemetery outside the Walls line in the suburb Waehring was created for the Jewish community, the Jewish cemetery Waehring. On the basis of Jewish religious law of the cemetery in the Seegasse remained untouched, while Christian cemeteries have been resolved and corrected.

When the Nazi authorities decided in January 1941 to raze the cemetery and to build in the area, distant and buried Jewish forced laborers on behalf of the Nazi regime a part of the grave stones at the Vienna Central Cemetery. In the 1980s, 280 of the original 931 grave stones were discovered there and prepared in accordance with the created by Bernhard Wachstein in the 1910s -built drawings to the original location. On 2 September 1984, the cemetery was inaugurated new. Since 2008, the cemetery in a cooperation of Israelite Jewish Community of Vienna, Bundesdenkmalamt and Vienna City Administration is restored. By 2012, so about 50 grave stones were restored. This work showed that some grave stones were buried in the Nazi era also in the cemetery Seegasse themselves where they are now exposed.

The inscriptions on the grave stones are held exclusively in Hebrew.