Berlin's Oldest Jewish Cemetery

I got lost biking to Berlin's oldest Jewish cemetery on Grosse Hamburger Strasse after returning from Weissensee.  No matter, there's always plenty to see wherever you are.

Street artists transformed this abandoned warehouse into a gallery of sorts.

 

A Holocaust memorial marked the entrance to the cemetery, now repurposed as a small park.  It opened in 1672 after 50 Jews, expelled from Vienna, were allowed to settle in Berlin for the first time in a century.  Nearly 3,000 Jews were buried here before the cemetery closed in 1827.

The few surviving gravestones line the walls of the park.  According to a memorial plaque, "they escaped the destructive rage of the Gestapo [in 1943] because of their firm anchoring."  The Nazis turned the cemetery grounds into an air raid shelter and lined it with the desecrated gravestones.

A restored gravestone for Moses Mendelssohn, a philosopher who died in 1786, symbolizes the loss of Jewish history, life and culture in Berlin.

I rode back to Moabit along the Spree River, past Museum Island.