Jewish Cemetery An der Strangriede (Hanover)

Hanover's Jewish community had grown considerably since the beginning of legal equality in 1842. Since the historical cemetery was no longer sufficient, it acquired a plot of land in the garden area far outside the city, today located in the middle of Hanover's Nordstadt. The new cemetery was solemnly consecrated in 1864. Its buildings on the street side - sermon hall, administration, mortuary and prayer hall - followed designs by the Jewish architect Edwin Oppler, who also built Hanover's New Synagogue at almost the same time. After the destruction of the Pogrom Night in 1938, the Preaching Hall represents Oppler's first and only surviving sacred building.

In the mid-1920s, at the time of its greatest expansion to more than 5,500 members, this cemetery was also almost completely occupied and the congregation acquired a new site in Bothfeld. Today, the An der Strangriede cemetery is the largest Jewish burial ground in Lower Saxony, with more than 2,500 preserved individual and family gravesites. It documents the development of Hanoverian Jewry in its period of growth and ascendancy. This is represented by graves such as the family grave of the important inventor and industrialist family Berliner, the graves of the founder of the Jewish Horticultural School Ahlem, Moritz Simon, the architect Edwin Oppler, the doctor, democrat and friend of Karl Marx, Louis Kugelmann, numerous important country rabbis such as Selig Gronemann and Samuel Freund, and many others.


In the fall of 1941, the Predigthalle forcibly served as one of Hanover's 15 "Jewish houses" for about 100 Jewish residents before their deportation.

It houses an exhibition on the history of Hanover's Jews, set up and maintained by historian Peter Schulze. It is to be visited (like cemetery and Predigthalle) only on the day of the open monument in September each year.