The cemetery has about 60 graves. Most of them are in a poor condition, many of them are broken or twisted out of the ground. When we discovered the cemetery, the whole territory was overgrown with weeds, one could hardly see the graves. By now the space has been cleared up thanks to the help of a few lovely people. We are very grateful for their help.

The cemetery worked from the beginning of the 1800s until the 1920s. The Jewish community here was flourishing in the 1850s, so most of the graves are from that period. At the time, there was a Jewish elementary school here too. There was a tiny synagouge next to the cemetery, which got destroyed during the Second World War, and the remains were used up to restore other houses. There is a corner of the cemetery where some of the ancestors of Sir George Solti, the world-famous conductor, are buried

Gábor (Gabriel) Dessauer was one of the rabbis of Balatonfőkajár throughout the years. He wrote several books and some poems in Hebrew. Gabriel was born in 1805 in Nyitra. He had two sons, Mór Dessauer and Gyula Dessauer who both became rabbis later on. Gabriel Dessauer passed away in 1878 at Balatonfőkajár after 40 years of being the rabbi there.

Mór, Gabriel Dessauer’s younger son was born in Balatonfőkajár in 1842. He studied the Talmud in Székesfehérvár and later became a rabbi. He first was the rabbi of Kothen and then became the Meining district rabbi – both in Austria. He became the first rabbi of Siófok. Similarly to his father he also wrote books in German. He passed away in Meining, in 1895.

Gyula Dessauer, the firstborn son of Gabriel Dessauer was born (the same place as his father), in Nyitra. First, his father thought him, later he went on to learn in multiple Jeshivas in Hungary. He became Újpest’s rabbi in 1960 and resigned seven years later to focus more on his writing career. He died five years after his father in 1883.

Most of the graves in the cemetery only have Hebrew scripts, and they are really hard to read. We could only make out a few of them. The first one we found was Singer Farkas (Wolf). We also found Singer Emilie, who died in Balatonfőkajár in 1896. Wolf had a son named Kalman (born in 1843), and a wife named Netti Weisz, unfortunately, we did not find their graves so far. Emilie could be Wolf’s daughter, but we did not find anything proving this yet.

I am 13 years old. My family has a holiday house in Balatonfőkajár, where we quaranteened last year. During our time there we found out that it has a Jewish cemetery. We visited it to take a look. It was in an awful shape, so we decided to do something. First I looked into the story of the Jewish community of Balatonfőkajár and the cemetery, then I started thinking about what I wanted to do. My goal is to get to know as much as possible about the story of the cemetery, and about the Jews of Balatonfőkajár. Also, I wanted to do something about condition of the cemetery, so we set out to prune the vegetation. We are also planning to fix the tilted and broken gravestones, and maybe we could even install a gate and a fence. On this site I am documeting this journey and posting all the information I can find. Many people are helping me in this work, I am really thankful for them!