Anyone who loves Adolph Menzel's picture of the Jewish Gottesackers in Prague will also find those cemeteries in Mainz and Worms picturesque.

In the Worms cemetery there are more than 2500 Jewish tombs from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, a globally unique and dense chronicle of the Jewish diaspora.

With the greenery between the steles, it looks like a field full of menhirs in Brittany.

Many other Jewish testimonies still shape the picture today, despite the National Socialists: in rural communities, artistically forged signs with golden stars of David, symbols of the privilege of brewing, still hang on restaurants today.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the features section.

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Sometimes there are conscious or unconscious transfigurations when it comes to Jewish things in Germany. Nowadays the narrow and crooked corners of the Josefov Jewish town of Prague or the Golden Lane, where Kafka lived between 1916 and 1917, is idyllized in a Biedermeier way. At the time of construction, the Jewish quarters, often segregated by their own walls and rarely expanded over the centuries, of which the street name "Judengasse" still bears witness in almost every German city, were built up close together out of sheer lack of space. Even the gravestones of the Jewish cemeteries in Germany, which are often half sunken in the ground or have fallen like embraces, often only appear so enchanted and picturesque because of years of neglect.

Medieval Jewish evidence is most densely preserved in Speyer, Mainz and Worms. The three cities on the Rhine form the so-called ShUM sites, which is composed of the first letters of the medieval Hebrew city names Schpira, Warmaisa (pronounced like a U) and Magenza. State authorities and the Jewish Community of Mainz have been working on the application for inclusion as a World Heritage Site since 2004, submitted it in 2020 and hope to be included in the Golden Book of the World Heritage Site. There has been Jewish life here since late antiquity - documents from the tenth century are first evidence of Mainz, and a synagogue was built here as early as 900. In the Middle Ages, without Jewish life, the cities would have been only half as lively, learned, internationally networked - and prosperous.

The three Jewish communities on the Rhine trading artery were centers of religious and cultural Jewish life north of the Alps ("Ashkenaz"). Around 1220 they founded an association through the joint adoption of community statutes, which historians are known to this day as the "statutes of the communities of ShUM" (Takkanot Kehillot SchUM) and which shaped Jewish culture, religion and jurisdiction in the diaspora. Outstanding architectural evidence from all these three areas has been preserved in the three ShUM sites, especially from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the respective synagogues and cemeteries for religion, the “women's schools” as places for women, who first entered the thirteenth century ShUM communities are tangible, and the "Mikwaot" for the ritual bath culture and the "Yeshivot" as teaching and learning houses.The ShUM sites were also an integral part of all three urban societies, which were mostly Christian, despite many setbacks, such as those caused by devastating pogroms and the resulting expulsions.