40,000 Graves at Old Jewish Cemetery in Frankfurt, Germany: Museum Documents Jewish History

The old Jewish cemetery in downtown Frankfurt is a big part of the city's Jewish history and heritage. It was used between 1828 and 1929 and there are approximately 40,000 graves. Here at the Frankfurt old Jewish cemetery the voice of a century speaks through these graves to reveal in fact a list of who's who in Frankfurt's Jewish history. There are many personalities of the Rothschild banking family, the most famous German Jewish painter Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, the noble prize winner for medicine Paul Ehrlich, the women's rights activist Bertha Pappenheim, Leopold Sonnemann the founder of the newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung - today known as Frankfurter Allgemeine banned by the Nazis in 1943, the philanthropists Henry and Emma Budge as well as the historian Isidor Kracauer.
The old Jewish cemetery covers 74,000 square meters, and at the front are the graves of about 800 Frankfurt Jews who evaded Nazi persecution and deportation by committing suicide. There are also 50 graves of German soldiers of the Jewish faith killed in the First World War. Some 12,000 Jews died for their country - ironically, it was a Jewish lieutenant, Hugo Guttmann, who awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, to a 29-year-old corporal named Adolf Hitler. Due to the graves of Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch and the Rabbi Israel von Stolin, the cemetery is visited by many orthodox Jews from around the world. Similar to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, people leave notes and light candles.
Samson Raphael Hirsch was a German rabbi best known as the intellectual founder of a school of contemporary Orthodox Judaism known as Torah im Derech Eretz - Torah with the way of the land. Israel von Stolin came from a famous dynasty of Hasidic rabbis from Belarus. Documentation of this cemetery is now being worked out by the Frankfurt Jewish museum. Frankfurt has a long and colorful German-Jewish history.
Wilson Ruiz, Jewish News One, Frankfurt.