Silent commemoration of the Jewish communities in the Oderbruch region
On some gravestones at the Jewish cemeteries in Groß Neuendorf and Wriezen there are delicate motifs of flowering and closed poppy plants.
The ceramist Karola Wirth, in coordination with the cultural heritage site Jewish cemetery Groß Neuendorf, has taken two of these motifs by means of clay printing by careful handwork from the gravestones and made ceramic plaques. Each of these unique plaques is intended as an occasion to commemorate Jewish culture. What has been lost in the Oderbruch with the expulsion and murder of people of Jewish faith and the loss of Jewish culture? What impulses are missing in public life? These are questions that are worth exploring.
In the small letter accompanying the plaque Karola Wirth writes: These exemplary relief prints were made from gravestones of the Jewish cemetery in Groß Neuendorf. In the Oderbruch there are also Jewish cemeteries in Wriezen, Oderberg, Bad Freienwalde. These rest in graceful silence, are testimonies of a culture long extinct here, embedded in our midst. Unconventional places that give space to pause and offer the chance to perceive the past and lost future of a culture. But also with the potential to free history from oblivion and to discover it anew. The dust of time has long since rested on the inscriptions and ornaments as a patina of delicate moss braiding. It is therefore all the more welcome that actors such as museums or artists are counteracting significant forgetting with various projects and using this heritage to stimulate a lively social debate. At the same time, this sends a signal against today's political polarization.
50 plaques, 25 each with the motif of the closed and 25 with the motif of the open poppy blossom, were made by Karola Wirth. On November 9 in Wriezen, on the occasion of the commemoration of the victims of the National Socialist pogroms on "Reichskristallnacht" 1937, some of the plaques were handed over to Mrs. Rindfleisch, who is in charge of the cultural heritage site Jewish Cemetery Groß Neuendorf, the Protestant parish and the town of Wriezen.
The plaques will be given to the collections at the heritage sites and to suitable actors in the places where a Jewish community was active, especially in Wriezen, Groß Neuendorf, Bad Freienwalde and Oderberg.