The Austrian Jewish Museum in Eisenstadt has embarked on a detailed project to document, digitize and locate the gravestones and epitaphs in the city’s Old Jewish Cemetery, which was in used from about 1679 to about 1875.
The cemetery is one of some 14 Jewish cemeteries in Burgenland. The Museum completed a digital documentation of the Jewish cemetery in Mattersberg in 2014.
According to the Museum’s web site, the “uppermost priority” of the current project, which was launched in January, is “to correctly decode and pinpoint all the individual graves of Eisenstadt’s Older Jewish Cemetery, to enable all visitors to become aware of and find a specific, desired gravesite.”
It cannot be emphasized often enough: the Hebrew headstone inscriptions are not an obsolete addendum to geneological research, in case they’re even able to fulfil such a role. They are primary sources for historians and genealogists. For Jewish specialists they are an inexhaustible cornucopia of riches which answer both obvious and arcane questions about the internal history of the Jewish communities. Above and beyond their historical value, moreover, the Hebrew inscriptions were composed with profound love and wisdom by human beings for their departed, they gave comfort and solace to the bereaved survivors. They possess timeless value and eternal validity. Reading the texts is a dignified memorial to the dead.
Already in 1922, Dr. Bernhard Wachstein, longstanding director of the Jewish Community of Vienna, published all the gravestone inscriptions of the cemetery in a book– Die Grabinschriften des Alten Judenfriedhofes in Eisenstadt (Eisenstädter Forschungen, hrsg. von Sándor Wolf, Band I, Wien 1922).
The current project is creating a digital edition of these inscriptions, as well as pinpointing the position of the stones and when possible providing information on the person commemorated.
Wachstein published in his account a numbered concordance in order to make possible a correlation, i.e. attribution, of the gravestones as a kind of substitute for a site map. However, the old incised Hebrew numbers are only evident on very few gravestones; and the more recent arabic numerals only legible on a handful. The search for a certain name and precise location where the grave of a given person is located in the cemetery is simply not possible nowadays. And within the next few years, even these halfway detectable tracings will have faded away beyond recognition. […]
Just how many of the 1,104 gravestones today (in 1922 there were 1,140) can ultimately be correctly ascribed cannot even be roughly estimated at this juncture. In equal measure, it also cannot be estimated how long it will take to complete the project. We intend to make every effort to place online all the assigned gravestones with inscriptions and site map without delay.
Click to read more about the cemetery and the project
Click to see growing digital database of the gravestones
1 comment on “Jewish cemetery documentation in Eisenstadt, Austria”
looking for names or a listing of monuments during the years from approx 1780–1900