Jewish Cemetery Freudental

The Freudental Jewish Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery in Freudental, a municipality in the Ludwigsburg district in Baden-Württemberg. The cemetery is a protected cultural monument. It is located at the foot of the Seeberg, on the Bönnigheim district.
The Jewish community of Freudental already had a Jewish cemetery from 1723, but it was leveled in 1811 to create a pheasant shop for the king of Württemberg. Four gravestone fragments are now in the former Synagogue Affaltrach.
After the old Jewish cemetery was closed, the Jewish community set up a new cemetery on the north-western slope of the Steinbach valley. It has an area of 24.92 ares and the small cemetery hall (Tahara house) has been preserved. The dead of the Zaberfeld Jewish community, which had been part of the Freudental Jewish community since 1832, were also buried in Freudental.
Today there are 435 gravestones (Mazewot) in the cemetery, the last funeral was in 1970.
In 2007 there were several desecrations in which gravestones were smeared, knocked over and also broken.

The new cemetery was established on Bönnigheim's land at the foot of the Seeberg. Its secluded location at the edge of the forest reflects both the religious requirement that Jewish burials be located extra muros (extra muros) and the tendency toward exclusion within the Christian majority. Originally, it only encompassed the area to the right of the present entrance gate. The oldest gravestone is that of Pesle Ballenberg, who died on December 4, 1811. The cemetery was primarily occupied from back to front, with women and men initially buried in separate rows. All older gravestones are made of sandstone, mostly flat steles. Their sole, but frequent, decoration is rounded arches. The model for the Mosaic tablets of the commandments is obvious. Gradually, the rounded arches were replaced by gables and cornices. The inscriptions were initially almost entirely in Hebrew. It wasn't until the mid-19th century that stones with a German inscription on the reverse, in addition to the Hebrew front, became more common. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, steles with bilingual fronts became more common. Gravestones with purely German inscriptions remained rare even in the 20th century. While the Freudental Cemetery thus documents the Jewish community's rapprochement with its non-Jewish surroundings, it also demonstrates the religious conservatism that characterized Freudental's Jews until the community's extermination by the Nazis.

Again and again worth seeing such an old cemetery with the old beautifully decorated stones.