On 25th September 1386, the government of the Most Serene Republic of Venice allotted to the Jews a piece of land on the Lido. The Lido, a narrow island one kilometer in length, still forms the border between the lagoon and the Adriatic, protecting Venice from maritime storms. This was a further significant step towards consolidating and confirming the Jewish presence in the city. Long before, however, the Jews were allotted the Ghetto as permanent residence. The land granted to the Jews lay on the side of the Lido facing the lagoon and was about two kilometers away from the city. The site was oblong in form and c. 5000m?2? in size. No building for the ritual cleansing of bodies existed, as the Tahara was carried out in the Ghetto. Gondolas took the coffins and mourners from the Ghetto to the cemetery, often attacked by the mob.

The Sephardim of Amsterdam, Jews from the Iberian peninsula who had reconverted to Judaism, 1614, bought a piece of land in Oederkerk on the river Amstel. The first burial took place in that same year. Joseph Senior, infant son of a community leader, received a small gravestone inscribed with a Hebrew poem in which the child tells readers he is the first to be buried in the cemetery. All the dead were to be transported by barge on canals and rivers from the city of Amsterdam and the neighboring towns. In 1616 the cemetery on the Amstel was officially inaugurated. During the following years of the 17?th? century, the cemetery got more and more enlarged. The first metaher (tahara) house was replaced by a new building in 1705. Restored in 1966, this now is one of the oldest and best-preserved tahara houses in Europe.

Since their expulsion in 1290 a few singular Jews had lived in England and it was only after Oliver Cromwell, in 1656, allowed them into the country again that Jewish communities started to blossom. In 1670 they built the first synagogue since the middle ages in the country. Sephardic Bevis Marks synagogue exists still today almost unchanged. In 1656, the year of Cromwell?s dispensation, a Antonio Carvajal leased a 1.5-hectare plot of land for 900years for the Sephardic Spanish-Portuguese community. The land lay a little way back from Mile End. The fact that the elders of nearby St Katherine Cree allowed the church bells to ring during the burial illustrates the unusually friendly rapport between Jews and Christians in 17?th? century London.

In 1862 the Jewish community of Z?rich bought a piece of land on the slopes of a mountain, quite outside the city in these days. Only in 1891 a mortuary hall, designed by the architects Alfred Chiodera and Theophil Tschudy was built. Both architects also designed the synagogues in the city centre and in St. Gallen. Similar to the synagogues the architects designed, the mortuary hall is a Moorish style, which looks especially exotic within in the picturesque Swiss countryside. The well preserved and restored hall is one of the best kept examples of its kind. Several refugees from Nazi Germany are buried here, as the famous opera singer Joseph Schmidt.

After the Shoah, only 6,000 people were left of the once blossoming Jewish community in Berlin: in 1933, some 160,000 Jews had lived there. The growing confrontation between East and West led to a need for the Jews of West Berlin to create a new cemetery on West Berlin. In 1953, the year in which Berlin was divided into East and West, an area in Grunewald was acquired. Following the design of the architect Curt Leschnitzer, a simple mourning room, a tahara building and various functional buildings were erected around a forecourt. From there, one passed through a gate to reach a square and the actual grounds themselves. The marked simplicity of these buildings also reflected the reticence that many German Jews of the time felt as they were unsure whether they should display themselves and their religion in such clear architectural terms in the ?land of the murderers?.

In Constantinople Jews had been living since the former Byzantium became capital of the East Roman Empire in 339 C.E. These Greek Jews were called Romaniotes. After the expulsion of their coreligionists from the Iberian peninsula in 1492 they faced an amazing influx of Sephardim who seeked refuge from prosecution. They were warmly welcomed by Sultan Bayezid II. Near their ancient living quarters the Jews were allowed to purchase ground for a cemetery at Hask?y, high above the Golden Horn, opposite the Old City. The cemetery was surrounded by a wall and there seems to have been a Tahara house. The Sephardic gravestones of the cemetery with their ottoman motifs are amazing examples of Jewish-Muslim intercultural exchange.

From 1784, Prague?s Olsany cemetery featured the designs of contemporary English landscape gardens. The site aimed to counter sombre thoughts with beauty. This beginning aestheticization of the Jewish cemetery is a key developmental strand. The park cemetery of Prague?s Olsany with its meandering pathways and planting schemes is therefore an important bridge between the traditional Jewish cemetery and the cemeteries of the time of the Emancipation.

The preobrazhensky cemetery was opened in 1874 as part of a Christian cemetery, 11 km away from the city centre. Without a specially designed system of walkways, the graves lay so low down that in some places the terrain was almost marshy, making grave-digging a very difficult task. To mitigate this, drainage ditches were dug parallel to the paths, which still exist today, creating a system of small picturesque canals. Here and there, small bridges stretch from the paths to the grave areas, reflecting the layout of the city itself with its wide canals lined by palaces. In 1908 a grand new mortuary hall designed by the young Jewish architect Yaacov Gevirtz was opened. With its arcades, forecourt and domed hall, even with its ornaments it strongly reflects classic ottoman mosques.

Up to the Shoa, the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, mostly Sephardic, was so big, that at some point a third of the city?s population was Jewish, keeping traditions, which they had taken with them from Andalusia in 1492. Their old cemetery lay immediately beyond the Byzantine city wall. Before its destruction by the Germans, it was one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe, its appearance resembling in many ways that of the Hask?y cemetery in Istanbul. After the Germans occupied the city, from 1943 on, they deported 50.000 Jews to the camps, where most of them were killed. Only very few managed to return, coming back into a ?City of Ghosts?. The new cemetery opened in 1960 in an industrial area, is one of the cemeteries created after 1945 that is most consistently designed as a monument to Shoah victims, reflecting the absolute centrality of this event for the postwar community. The new graves are arranged virtually concentrically around a monument commemorating the Jews murdered by the Germans.

This is one of the most ambitious cemetery projects in Europe of the 21?st? century. Opened in 2003 and designed by the architect Jan Jaap Walvisch, the 51 by 362 metres plot is surrounded by canals and according to halakha strictly west-east orientated. A mortuary hall with Tahara is partly built with stone from Jerusalem and its design is based on principles derived from Kabala. This cemetery shows how the rules of halakha are followed by a Liberal community with a strong sense of tradition and of the history of European Jewry, now more than 2000 years long.

A first Jewish cemetery is mentioned in an entry dating from 1180 in Frankfurt?s city archives, with reference to a tax for a garden outside the gates where one finds the Jewish cemetery. It is generally thought that in 1270 the Jews created the second cemetery, still standing today, in accordance with halakhic rules, on garden and pasture land outside the fortifications, to the east of the city. The city was expanded in 1333 and since this time, the cemetery has lain within the fortified zone. This remained the burial place for Frankfurt?s Jews for more than 500 years. A Tahara house built in 1575 was one of the earliest in Europe. The founding father of the Rothschild banking dynasty, Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), is buried here.

Jews had been living in Berlin since the 13th century. After earlier expulsions they were readmitted to the then capital of Prussia. Jews from Vienna founded the new community in 1670 and bought a plot outside the city walls on the street leading to Hamburg. The cemetery was surrounded by a wall and according to Aschkenazi tradition standing gravestones were arranged in long rows with narrow paths in between. The most famous person to be buried here is the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). The friend of Lessing, who was in correspondence for a long time with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, was the leading figure of the ?haskala? or Jewish Enlightenment.

A circle that had started with multi-faith cemeteries of the early Middle Ages closed in 1804 in Napoleonic Paris, when once again a multi-faith cemetery was built: the P?re-Lachaise. For the first time in Europe, the emancipated, equal Jews were assigned a separate section, initially separated by a wall. The architect Alexandre-Th?odore Brongniar issued strict specifications in his draft of the design, which only partly were followed. As well as an elaborate gateway with entrance and side rooms, he also wanted to split the section precisely in two using a tree-lined avenue. At the outer edges, along the wall, he envisaged the erection of identically shaped family graves. Brongniart?s design is certainly the first one to be drawn up for a Jewish cemetery by a non-Jew, and the design described could not be more different from the Jews? traditional cemeteries.

Opened in 1880 after a design competition, the huge size of forty hectares made it vital that the cemetery be developed in a systematic and aesthetically pleasing fashion. Because of this size, which made graves hard to locate, it was undesirable to develop the site more or less at random. It was, moreover, essential to utilize every inch of the expensive land as effectively as possible. This required a complex system of major and minor avenues, squares, and a network of minor paths. Hugo Licht?s award-winning design provided all these elements and reflected the avenues, streets and squares of Wilhelminian Berlin. The ?house of life?, for millennia, was a place whose key component was the individual grave, now became the city of the dead, the necropolis, its form a faithful reflection of the city of the living with its class-system.

In 1874 the cemetery on Salg?tarj?ni Utca was opened as part of a municipal cemetery. While still being part of this large cemetery complex, the Jewish cemetery remained demarcated from the non-Jewish one by a separating wall and had a separate entrance. The wall was intended to satisfy the ritual requirement for the cemetery?s structural isolation. Two historical trends become manifest through the construction: on the one hand, the Jews of Budapest had ?arrived? as equal citizens in the heart of Hungarian society. Consequently, the new Jewish cemetery was created in the context of the municipal cemetery. At the same time, however, with its separate entrance and wall, the efforts to live by the traditional expectations of a Jewish cemetery are still evident, and with it the attempt to retain a certain level of religious and cultural identity. One of the most famous Jewish architects of the early 20?th? century, B?la Lajta, designed a mock medieval Hungarian castle like entrance building and a neo-mesopotamian tahara house ? unique in the history of Jewish cemeteries,