About

Net Olam – Jewish Cemeteries in the Focus of Antisemitism and Prevention

Over 2,000 Jewish cemeteries in Germany represent a unique religious and cultural heritage, in some cases dating back to the Middle Ages. In many communities, they are the last visible evidence of Jewish history. Almost all cemeteries were desecrated during the National Socialist period. A large number of gravestones were destroyed, and not a few cemeteries were even leveled and built over. In contrast to Christian tradition, under Jewish religious law, graves must be preserved forever, that is, until the Day of Judgment, since only an intact grave guarantees the resurrection of the deceased. Desecration therefore has a greater impact in Judaism than in Christianity. And not least, given the millions of victims of the Shoah who were left without graves, the existing graves have special significance for the relatives of the victims and the Jewish community. But even after the end of the war, Jewish burial sites continued to be targeted by attacks. Numerous desecrations are still reported each year, with damage that often can no longer be repaired. These acts affect not only the relatives and local Jewish communities, but also shock the global Jewish community and civil society.

This website provides research data on desecrations and attacks of all kinds on graves, buildings, and facilities of Jewish cemeteries in Germany since 1945 that could be assigned to a specific Jewish cemetery. So far, over 2,000 such cases have been documented. In many other desecrations, only the region or city is known.

The attacks can be accessed via the respective cemetery either in the map view or in the catalog view, and the entire dataset (CSV, JSON) can also be downloaded. The website also offers information on methods, perpetrators, and timeframes, and in some cases on legal or societal responses to the acts. Various filters enable targeted searches by form of desecration, time period, federal state, or location.

For further information on the website, its use, and the data basis, please see our FAQ.

The Project

The joint project „Net Olam. Jüdische Friedhöfe im Fokus von Antisemitismus und Prävention“ was funded from 2021 to 2025 by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, from 2025 BMFTR). The three project partners had different focuses for their research:

• In the subproject “Desecration of Jewish Cemeteries in Germany: Systematic Survey, Analysis, and Development of a Preventive Network,” the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute for German-Jewish History, Essen (Dr. Helge-Fabien Hertz), investigated attacks on Jewish cemeteries in Germany. Through extensive archival research, literature review, and discussions with the Jewish state associations and the state criminal investigation offices, the aim was to compile as complete a survey of desecrations since 1945 as possible.
• In the subproject “Commemoration, Admonition, Learning – Jewish Cemeteries as Sites of the Landscape of Remembrance,” the Bet Tfila – Research Unit for Jewish Architecture in Europe at TU Braunschweig (Dr. Katrin Keßler) examined the role and future possibilities for Jewish cemeteries as part of the remembrance topography. Existing models for integrating Jewish cemeteries into educational work and as extracurricular learning and memorial sites were considered in order to develop recommendations for the future.
• The Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (BLfD, Elisabeth Singer-Brehm M.A.) examined in the subproject “Desecrations of Jewish Cemeteries in Bavaria – Damage Patterns, Extent, Historical Context, Analysis” the concrete consequences of desecrations for the stock of gravestones and the microhistorical context of the desecration events using case studies. The damage patterns were described in an innovative online database and thus for the first time recorded as statistically evaluable data on the type, quality, and extent of the damage. The subproject worked closely with the project “Survey of Jewish Gravestones in Bavaria” started in 2020 by the BLfD for the comprehensive documentation of the approximately 80,000 gravestones in the 124 Jewish cemeteries in Bavaria.

Research Network Antisemitism in the 21st Century

The Net Olam project was part of the “Research Network Antisemitism in the 21st Century” (FoNA21) in the funding line “Current Dynamics and Challenges of Antisemitism” of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, comprising a total of ten joint projects and one meta-project. Further information can be found here.

Publications from the Project