Berlin, Germany - Community Battles to Save Jewish Graves

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Berlin, Germany - Europe’s largest Jewish cemetery, located in east Berlin, is a vast jungle of overgrown headstones and crumbling monuments decaying so fast that the city has mounted a campaign to rescue it.

Weissensee Cemetery’s grand tombs date to the heyday of Jewish life in Berlin in the early 20th century, but they have been left untended and fallen into disrepair because the sons and daughters of the 115,000 people buried here were killed in the Holocaust.

The cemetery also contains a memorial to the 12,000 Jewish soldiers who died fighting for Germany in the First World War.

The site also stands as a reminder that Germany’s Jewish community is unlikely ever to regain the size and significance it had before the Nazis came to power.

“Very little was done to maintain the site in communist times, and we don’t know where the money is supposed to come from to restore it,” said Maya Zehden, a spokeswoman for Berlin’s 12,000 strong Jewish community.

“We are preparing an application to get the cemetery recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site.” That would place Weissensee in the same league as the Great Wall of China, the pyramids of Egypt and the rock-carved city of Petra in Jordan.

Today, a blanket of ivy covers much of the 42-hectare cemetery, giving it a romantic, forlorn look. Crooked headstones jutting out of the vegetation in the gloomy shadow of trees add a haunting feel. Many of the tombs are propped up by wooden poles or have collapsed altogether, their carved stones lying abandoned in the ivy.

Berlin says it is too strapped for cash to finance a complete overhaul, but is backing the application for world heritage status that would guarantee long-term funding from the federal government.

But Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said Weissensee was “in competition” with other Jewish cemeteries around Europe and cast doubt on whether it could attain world heritage status in its own right.