According to the historian Janina Valančiūtė, up to the end of the 19th century, the majority of the Jews in Gargždai resided in the current J. Basanavičius Street, and as of the end of the 19th century and within the 20th century, the areas inhabited by the Jewish community stretched along the Market Square and Klaipėda Street. By the Act of 1638 of Władysław IV Vasa, King of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Jews of the town of Gargždai were given the right to have a cemetery and so, around the mid-17th century, a Jewish cemetery was established in the southeast part of the town close to the right bank of the Minija River. According to local residents, the area of the cemetery occupied about 4 hectares.
The destruction of Jewish cemeteries started during World War II when the Germans dug defensive fortifications. Later, the western part of the cemetery was allocated for land plots designed for collective gardening. That decision meant permission to destroy the historically formed boundaries of the cemetery area and the arrangement of rows of graves, as well as to remove old tombstones.
In 1992, the cemetery fence and graves were restored, with some authentic tombstones remaining.
In 2018, Israeli Ambassador Amir Maimon visited Gargždai. While walking around the cemetery, the ambassador admired the well-maintained Jewish burial site, indicated the place where the original entrance to the cemetery was (on the city side, where the current fences of private households stand, and the road leading to the cemetery, which is no longer existent) and read and translated some of the inscriptions on the tombstones. Some of the graves are of Jewish people who died more than a hundred years ago.
Traditionally, men and women in Jewish cemeteries are buried in separate rows; however, in Gargždai, a female tombstone is inserted here and there into the men’s row, so some of the toppled tombstones were likely removed and placed elsewhere. Jewish tombstones often had inscriptions indicating not only the name, surname, year of birth and death of the deceased but also the profession and trade. It is customary in Jewish cemeteries to bring or to plant flowers, but to avoid intricate decorations – only the styles of tombstones may differ slightly.
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