Weißensee Jewish Cemetery

The cemetery was created because the Jewish Community's older burial ground on Schönhauser Allee, in use since 1827, was reaching capacity as the community grew. The architect Hugo Licht won the competition of 1878. At the entrance stand yellow-brick buildings in Italian Neo-Renaissance style, including the square mourning hall with its apse. The burial fields are laid out as triangles, rectangles and trapezoids, and tree-lined avenues lead to crossings shaped as circles, squares or octagons.

Plain, traditional headstones stand beside elaborate family tombs, some designed by well-known architects. A memorial stone near the entrance commemorates the six million murdered Jews. Because whole families were murdered under the Nazi regime, many graves from before 1945 have no surviving relatives. The cemetery came through the Second World War largely intact, although bombing damaged parts of it.

Buried here are the philosopher Hermann Cohen, the publisher Samuel Fischer, the composer Louis Lewandowski, the painter Lesser Ury, the writer Stefan Heym, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the resistance fighter Herbert Baum. The cemetery is a place of remembrance. Information for visitors is provided by the Jewish Community of Berlin.