53

During the Nazi era, the role and boundaries of Jewish cemeteries underwent profound change. The places where Jews could grieve and honor their dead were utterly ransacked. This article focuses primarily on the upheavals that occurred in the Reich’s cemeteries under the Nazi regime. It then deals with a post-war conflict in Fulda where the JRSO, a major Jewish restitution organization, fought to recover the town’s former Jewish cemetery in its entirety. The history of such institutions, both in the Nazi era and in the decades following 1945, raises broad questions about how we understand the contours of “Jewish space” in Germany, its destruction, and the possibility or impossibility of its restoration.