New Israelite Cemetery

In 1904, when the Old Israelite Cemetery became too small, a new cemetery was built on Garchinger Straße in Munich-Freimann; designed in the style of a park, it was consecrated in 1908. The new cemetery contains some 8,000 graves. The architect responsible for the cemetery building was Munich city planner Hans Grässel, who later took charge of the city planning department and also designed the chapel of rest in Munich’s North Cemetery (Nordfriedhof). Those killed in action during the First World War are commemorated by a cenotaph created by architect Fritz Landauer. A memorial stone erected in 1946 remembers victims of the Holocaust. The cemetery was refurbished in the late 1980s.

The cemetery contains many different gravestones with inscriptions in German. Munich’s rabbis and their wives are buried side by side in a kind of row of honor, as is the physician Julius Spanier, director of the Israelite infirmary and nurses’ home and camp physician at the transit camp in Berg am Laim. In June 1942, he was deported to Theresienstadt Ghetto and Concentration Camp but survived and returned to Munich. A rod of Asclepius adorns his gravestone in token of his profession. The cemetery contains many different gravestones with inscriptions in German.

The Nazis’ destructive frenzy did not even stop at the cemeteries. In 1933, Munich city council decided to “destroy the funerary monuments of Marxist revolutionaries”, which led to the forced reburial of the mortal remains of Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer. The urn of Kurt Eisner, the first State Premier of the Free State of Bavaria, who was murdered in 1919, was dug up from the East Cemetery (Ostfriedhof), while the urn of Gustav Landauer, member of the Bavarian soviet republic, who was also murdered in 1919, was dug up from under an obelisk at the Forest Cemetery (Waldfriedhof). Both urns were sent to the Jewish Community for burial at the New Israelite Cemetery; the Community also received an invoice.

During the Third Reich, Jews were increasingly excluded from German society; they were denied access to public sports facilities and swimming baths, which meant that the Jewish cemeteries were often the last open spaces still available to children, young people, and sports enthusiasts. At times, the New Israelite Cemetery also served as a sports ground and venue for sports lessons given by the Jewish elementary school. Some Jews who had gone into hiding managed to survive there for over a year with the help of cemetery caretaker Karl Schörghofer. Once the Jewish Community had been deported, the cemetery fell victim to desecration, while gravestones were looted and the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization stripped the grave enclosures in a bid to collect metal.

The cemetery was refurbished in the late 1980s. Like every other Jewish cemetery, the New Israelite Cemetery reflects the community’s fate and is extremely important in religious terms: in the Jewish faith, cemeteries are sacrosanct and are seen as ‘eternal resting places’.