Prague: A European capital cobbled with Jewish gravestones

Also in a few places in Poland.

That's because the Jewish community in Munich had concerns about people walking over the memorials, so they asked them not to be placed there.

Modern people spend so little time thinking about death that they often are incensed when they hear stories like these. For example, graveyard real estate is at a premium. More people die than can be fit in them. When you die, your corpse lies in the ground for a few years up to a decade at best. Then the gravedigger digs up your remains, put them in the trash and the next corpse is put in the hole. This is why grave digging requires a strong stomach -- it is far from certain that the corpse has fully decomposed. The trash is hopefully incinerated, providing energy for the living. Literally from Dust to Dust.

Same thing with tombstones which are recycled all the time. All larger cemeteries have huge stacks of stones waiting to get crushed into gravel. I cannot say if the practice in Communist countries specifically targeted Jewish cemeteries and if it was therefore antisemitic. Now whether the antisemitic part is not scrubbing the stones clean from inscriptions. Perhaps a large number of Jewish cemeteries were derelict due to the dwindling number of communities and it was easier to take stones from these?

In Thessaloniki, second largest Greek city, one can still find entire tombstones embedded in houses' yards:

http://valiacaldadog.blogspot.com/2009/02/blog-post_3356.htm...

The blog post above explains that the Jewish year 5676 on one of the stones is ~1915 AD.

Thessaloniki was once the city with the largest Jewish population in Europe, and the one with the largest Jewish cemetary (300,000 - 500,000 tombs) in the world [1].

During the Nazi occupation, after the Nazis abducted the members of the community and sent them to Auschwitz (with the collusion of the puppet authorities and the Greek Orthodox church), the people of the city took the tombstones from the cemetary and used them in their houses. They were also used to line the cobbled streets of the city, but I couldn't find any pictures online showing this clearly. Worse, it seems like the city's Aristoteleion university was built on top of the cemetary grounds [1].

The story of the Jewish community's treatment by the Greek citizens of Thessaloniki during the occupation fills me with shame, as a Greek woman. I prefer to remember the actions of the Archbishop of Zakynthos, Chrystostome: asked by the Nazis, in 1943, to provide a list with the names of all the Jewish Zakynthians, the archbishop delivered a list with only two names: his own and that of the mayor of the city. The two men had previously worked together to help the Jewish inhabitants to escape, by providing them with forged papers, etc [2,3].

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[1] https://abravanel.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/jewish-cemetery-o...

From the English version:

Of course the city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) has a long tradition in desecrating Jewish tombs – one needs only to visit many of its churches and public squares which are paved with looted tombstones by the old Jewish Cemetery. That particular cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in the world with an area over 350 acres and tombs from the 2nd century CE, was destroyed by the Municipality of Salonica in 1942 while his Jewish citizens were rounded in the Baron Hirsch Ghetto before being sent to Auschwitz to be murdered there. Or one can dig inside the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki to find the bones of 300/500.000 Jews who are still buried there in the grounds the University desecrated to build its buildings.

[2] http://www.kathimerini.gr/832170/article/politismos/vivlio/t... (Greek)

[3] http://www.aish.com/ho/p/The-Jews-of-Zakynthos.html

Czech people don't have a lot of respect for graveyards in general, se this one in Turnov

https://cs.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soubor:Turnov-%C5%BEidovsk%C...