Saturday, September 27, 2008

The Jewish Cemetary

this is the cemetary that I am doing my art project on. The cemetary is in a very bad state of disrepair. As you can see from most of the photos
This is one of the larger tombs that has been broken into probably by a homeless person. They proably wanted to sleep in it, see there is a green mattress thingy.
This is the graves of a more prominent family. The fron of the graves have been smashed in, probably vandalism, I dont think anyone could sleep in that space. Also you can see four holes on the top of the first grave, there used to be some symbol (not sure what) that was made out of brass. During the second world war the nazis came into the graveyard and stole allthe metal symbols off of the graves in order to melt down into amunition.
This isn't the best photo because of all the plants, but there is a wall there. This wall actuallycuts into the graveyard. During world war two the nazis dug out the graves that were here and tried to make some sort of bomb shelter. When they dug everything up they didn't let the jewish community take the bodies,they just came in with a digger and moved all the dirt and bones together to another location. Obviously they mixed everything up, and people could try and claim bones afterwards, but it was kind of pointless. The place where they moved the bones and dirt to was wherever there were other holes (from bombs). Now most of the bones are under Westbahnhoff (the west train station) and the part of the cemetary that they dug up has an apartment building on it.
As you can see the cmetary has not been treated nicely and we are trying to ring awareness to the situation through our art piece. If you know anyone that would like to contribute to this (i.e. donate money) please tell me.




1 comment:

Dan said...

I really like the script on the stones, I like how orderly it is in places, but still has curves and organic shapes in areas.