There are more than 2000 surviving Jewish cemeteries in Germany, some dating from as far back as the eleventh century. Despite great losses, no other European country possesses a comparably old, rich and multi-layered Jewish tradition. These cemeteries are among the oldest testimonies to sepulchral culture in Germany, and therefore their preservation, documentation, development and dissemination is a task of great importance to society as a whole. Nevertheless, they have not yet received the attention they deserve as places of remembrance with both religious and cultural significance, as expressions of individual and corporate Jewish identity, and as historical, literary and material sources.
This is where the „Steinerne Zeugen digital“ project comes in: By selecting, collecting and editing Hebrew and Hebrew-German tomb inscriptions from across the German-speaking countries and by recording and analysing the form, structure, construction, material and preservation of the gravestones, a representative digital text and image corpus will be created, documented and sustainably archived. This data will be combined with the digital recording of spatial and structural characteristics and detailed topographical relationships. As a result, a representative, interdisciplinary, multimodal data set will be created and permanently secured. On this basis, the grave inscriptions, gravestone designs and spatial relationships within the cemeteries can be systematically analysed both diachronically and synchronously for the first time. The results will be made accessible to the public for further scientific research.