In 1829, when the cemetery was established, it was located outside the town. From the north it adjoined the Jewish military cemetery established in 1918. Both of these cemeteries were devastated during World War II by the Nazis, who used the tombstones as flagstones for the so-called Black Way in the concentration camp in Majdanek.

After World War II what was left of the new cemetery was just an empty square, a piece of wall and two devastated ohels of Rabbi Meir Shapiro (the founding figure of the yeshiva in Lublin who died in 1933) and the famous Tzadik Jehuda Lejb Eigner (died in 1888). Shapiro’s tombstone is only a symbol now because his remains were taken to the Har Hamnochet cemetery in Jerusalem. The ohel of Tzadik Eigner was replaced with a much more modest one in 1959.

After the war the town council allowed to build a road running through the cemetery. As a result the area was divided into two squares, 3,5 hectares each. In the late 1980s the Sara and Manfred Frenkel Foundation took care of the cemetery and in 1989 it was added to the National Register of Historic Monuments.

Part of the cemetery is still open and used as a burial site by the Lublin Jewish community. There are numerous mass graves from World War II, about fifty contemporary tombstones and two monuments dedicated to Nazi victims.

The renovation financed by the Sara and Manfred Frenkel Foundation was completed in1991. The area was walled in and a building holding a memorial room was erected, which is connected with a little synagogue commemorating its founders, the Basses and the Frenkels. It houses a permanent exhibition tracing the history of Jewish cemeteries in Lublin. The memorial room is open to visitors every day. The key can be obtained from caretakers on the first floor of the mausoleum )[1.1].

The cemetery is surrounded with a wall made of concrete slabs in the shape of matzevot with metal menorahs. On the inner side of the fence the descendants of the Jews from Lublin have been putting up plaques commemorating their families.

There are also monuments in the cemetery, including one commemorating 190 Jews executed during the expulsion from the ghetto. The monument has a shape of a cemetery wall. A monument in the shape of an ohel with the ashes of murdered Jews is located in another part of the cemetery, which can be reached crossing Andersa Street.

 

Punkt na mapa.targeo.pl [accessed on May 9, 2009].

Punkt na mapy.google.pl [accessed on May 9, 2009].