In the Große Hamburger Straße

TO close the assembling of the Mendelssohn clan, there was a photography session and farewell at the old Jewish cemetery in the Große Hamburger Straße during the early afternoon. It proved quite short and sweet, so I won't write much about it, but let pictures cribbed from Wikimedia Commons speak for me:

The graveyard is largely empty, since the contents were destroyed in the 1940s; covering much of it there is a carpet of ivy growing amidst the trees and neat gravel paths, tall elderly apartment houses in excellent and neat condition and fences and walls around, and a couple of salvaged gravestones standing either in a proud pair at the entrance or along one wall. It is still considered as a religious site, so my brothers wore kippot.

IN one corner, standing on its own, is the gravestone of Moses — not the original stone, but its descendant. It has a German-language inscription on one side, and a Hebrew-language one on the other, which can be seen here:

    Source: Achim Raschka (photo uploaded December 2005), via Wikimedia Commons

The pebbles on top of the gravestone are, if I remember correctly, a Jewish symbol to mark that someone is thinking of the person who lies there. Since Moses's wife Fromet is buried far away, in Hamburg, one of the members of the Mendelssohn Society took the trouble to bring one of the pebbles from the top of her gravestone, so it could be lain on her husband's. There was a little ceremony surrounding that, and I thought it was a nice inspiration.

The photography session was given a touch of profundity as a cellist performed two sedate and echoing movements from Bach's cello suites; then came the speeches. These also commemorated the assassination ninety years ago today of Walther Rathenau, former German foreign minister during the Weimar Republic and friend of my great-grandfather, I think.

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Then Mama, Ge., J. and I took the S-Bahn home again, together. (I was still showering and such when they left earlier today, so I set forth on my own. Having emerged from the Oranienburger Straße station, I went the wrong direction for a couple minutes and had to find my way with the assistance of a map in a bus station. It wasn't too bad and I still arrived early at the graveyard — indeed I wondered if I had come after the ship had sailed, so to speak, because it was fairly deserted — but I was sweating like the kosher equivalent of a pig afterwards. I was only pleased that this wasn't a job interview, because that's generally the reason for my wandering aimlessly around unfamiliar streets in mid- and eastern Berlin.)

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LASTLY, here is an engraving for no particular reason of Moses and Lessing, as well as (possibly) Johann Kaspar Lavater:

Illustration: "Kupferstich nach einem Gemälde von Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800-1882)" via Wikimedia Commons