Centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Austria gets digital update

Jewish Museum in Eisenstadt completes project to digitize over 1,000 graves from between 1679 and 1875

By JTA 30 October 2015, 10:44 am

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An abandoned Jewish cemetery in the city of Tarnow, Poland, on April 29, 2014. (Yossi Zeliger/Flash90)

The Jewish Museum in Eisenstadt, Austria, has completed a project to digitize over 1,000 graves in the city’s Jewish cemetery.

The cemetery was in use from 1679 to 1875. Many of the headstones were so worn from time and the elements that the inscriptions were not readable.

In about eight months of work, the city’s Jewish Museum documented all 1,082 graves and affixed a QR code to each one, which, when scanned by a smartphone, will report who is buried in the grave, when the person died and a list of relatives, news website The Local reported.

Eisenstadt’s Jewish cemetery attracts thousands of tourists, pilgrims and relatives of the dead from around the world, according to The Local.