Brno's Jewish Cemetery

Earlier today, Katka, Claudia, Norbert and I went to visit Brno's Jewish cemetery.  The 8.6-acre cemetery is in the Židenice quarter of town.






The cemetery was founded in 1852 and it is the largest Jewish cemetery in Moravia.





There are around 12,000 graves and the cemetery is still in use.  There are many different styles of graves.





All of the tombstones are written in Czech, German, and/or Hebrew.  The cemetery is a protected Czech national monument.


Hugo Haas, 1901-1968, was a popular actor and the first Czech person to make it big in Hollywood.  Since he was Jewish, he was thrown out of the Czech National Theater in the 1930s and fled to the USA.

The Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust was unveiled in 1950.  It honors the 13,000 people from Brno, and nearby villages, that were deported to concentration camps.

Two of the unmarked graves in front

In Brno, 807 Jews died before being transported to concentration camps.  These people were from Brno, the surrounding villages, and refugees from Germany and other invaded countries.  These graves of these people are scattered throughout the cemetery.  Almost 200 of them were not allowed to have a tombstone raised.  The Jewish Community of Brno raised the funds needed to build gravestones on the unmarked graves.