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This chapter examines Jewish cemeteries, wills, and funerals. One of the first religious requirements of each Jewish community in Umbria, whatever its size, was its own cemetery; the cemetery boundary expanded and contracted in line with the community's growth or decline. While Christians chose their last resting-place in the churches or in their adjacent cemeteries, Jews were allotted peripheral burial-places, well out of town. This physical separation of the dead in some sense highlighted the difference in status between ‘established’ Christian citizens and Jews, who were merely tolerated and granted temporary citizenship. Meanwhile, for Italian Jews, a will was not only a private legal deed settling the inheritance of property; it was also a religious act through which the believer expressed their desire to be buried in the Jewish cemetery, acknowledged their sins, and redeemed them through appropriate bequests. The chapter then studies Jewish funerals. Jewish funeral processions sometimes aroused people's most aggressive instincts, and on such occasions, the Jews became the target not only of insults, obscenities, and boorish comments, but of vicious and even fatal stonings.

Cemeteries are normally associated with death. This chapter, however, shows how a walk through a cemetery can become a quick lesson in history, narrating the author's experiences when she visited the Jewish cemetery on Gorechi Hill, along with Carl and Lotte Hirsch. It describes in detail the cemetery, its location, and several of its oldest and most impressive monuments and gravestones, then explaining how their walk through the Jewish cemetery helped reveal a lot of information about Jewish life and society. From there, the chapter discusses the societal transformations that happened during the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph, as well as the personal history of Chaja and Yohanan Wurmbrand, Carl's maternal grandparents. It also discusses the question of language, the assimilation integration, and some Yiddish history.

This chapter is an overview of the Jewish war graves in western Galicia. Jewish soldiers were part of the multinational Austrian army. They fought on all fronts of the First World War and were killed with their comrades in arms of other nationalities and religions, but if identified as Jews they were buried separately. In western Galicia, bloody battles between Austrian and Russian armies lasted until May 1915. There are hundreds of military cemeteries and military sections in parish cemeteries in this area. In spite of continuing war (there were battles in eastern Galicia and in Bukovina), a systematic burial of the dead at newly established cemeteries began. It was carried out by the War Graves Division (K. u. k. Kriegsgräber-Abteilung) established in the spring of 1915 and located in Kraków. Between summer 1915 and autumn 1918, the War Graves Division designed and constructed 365 cemeteries.

This chapter offers some remarks on Leszek Hońdo's study of the old Jewish cemetery in Kraków. For centuries, the old Jewish cemetery in Kraków has attracted the special attention of researchers on Jewish antiquity and pious pilgrims to holy grave sites, as well as ordinary travellers and the simply curious. Recently, the need for a detailed inventory of the grave sites has become ever more urgent, particularly with the pace of erosion of the headstones. Following the publication by earlier historians of several incomplete descriptions of the cemetery in Kraków, Leszek Hońdo took a full inventory between 1994 and 1997. On the basis of this work, he has published a volume entitled Stary żydowski cmentarz w Krakówie: Historia cmentarza, analiza hebrajskich inskrypcji (The Old Jewish Cemetery in Kraków: History of the Cemetery with Analysis of the Hebrew Inscriptions). The chapter then reviews Hońdo's work, discussing the wider methodological issues arising in the analysis and description of Jewish cemeteries.

This chapter presents an obituary for Julian Stryjkowski. Julian Stryjkowski is often referred to as a man who became a writer because of the tragic events of the war. He was the indirect chronicler of the Shoah, and the last guardian of the vast Jewish cemetery Poland was turned into during the war. Undoubtedly, the Holocaust gave him a strong and final impetus to record the vanished community in all its richness, but he had already started writing before the war. It is hard to say, however, what turns his career would have taken if not for the Holocaust. The main themes in Stryjkowski's writing are human suffering and tragic existence, troublesome friendships, frustrated loves, the influence of history upon the human condition, and most of all the problem of identity.