Recording our Ancestors: Part 1

“He gave up the ghost and died and was gathered unto his people at an old age and full of years.”

I found this fascinating inscription as I wandered in the Jewish Cemetery in Orange Street, downtown Kingston recently. There I met with a group from Caribbean Volunteer Expeditions, which has been documenting Jamaica’s Jewish heritage in painstaking detail for some years now.  Headed by New York-based architect Rachel Frankel, the ten volunteers from Boston, Washington, New Orleans, Colorado and New York were part of an annual trip to Jamaica that began in 2007 in Falmouth. Volunteers then started to investigate the Hunt’s Bay Jewish Cemetery in 2008. Ainsley Henriques, a leading member of the Jamaican Jewish community, told me this had been derelict for nearly 100 years, but has now been cleaned up. Since 2009, volunteers moved on to an inventory of Orange Street. This year they were to complete the documentation of graves before 1880, when the government mandated the systematic registration of deaths.

A view across the Orange Street Jewish Cemetery from the older side.

The Jewish community in Jamaica is over 350 years old. Only five countries in the world have had a continuous, uninterrupted open Jewish practice, without being suppressed. Jamaica has a pretty strong record of religious tolerance through the centuries. The Spanish Inquisition never took root in the island – due to the influence of Christopher Columbus and his family – but was exported to nearby countries such as Mexico and Cuba. Jews were never allowed in the Spanish New World. The Sephardic Jews who began to arrive in Jamaica from the mid seventeenth century from Spain and Portugal were fleeing the horrors of the Inquisition. They first settled in Port Royal, and then in the capital, Spanish Town, and finally in Kingston. But their civil rights (including their ability to vote) were restricted until 1831, like those of free people of color. Other, smaller waves of Jewish immigrants followed centuries later: in the early twentieth century (from the Middle East – the Matalon brothers arrived from Damascus, for example), and in 1941, when the British government arranged for Jews threatened by Hitler’s Germany to seek refuge in Jamaica.

Not all the gravestones are intact. Many have Hebrew inscriptions, as seen in this fragment.

Ms. Frankel told me about the work of Philip Wright, author of “Monumental Inscriptions of Jamaica.” In the 1960s Wright collaborated with Richard Barnett, a classicist and Keeper of Records, on a book called “The Jews of Jamaica: Tombstone Inscriptions.” The book is out of print; but the University of Florida has digitized it. Here is the link for this book: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00001365/00001

David London and Tulane University student Michelle at work.

I met with Michelle, a student of Preservation Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans – famous for its cemeteries and funeral traditions – who told me that in that city every family is responsible for the upkeep of graves. Here in Orange Street, the cemetery was well-kept; the grass was cut and the lovely old brick wall surrounding it is in good condition. The condition of the older graves varies considerably. Some of the nineteenth-century ones, built of red brick with a marble covering, are falling down; other tombs, though numbered, were in bad repair, and some graves were marked out in conch shells.

David London, of Boulder, Colorado showed me the detailed sheet on which each grave is recorded.

Rachel Frankel measures the grave of “Isaac Cespedes, Esq., Late Merchant of this City.”

One of the fine marble graves in an unusual shape, being recorded by Rachel Frankel and David London. I noticed how many of the graves noted the ages of the departed not only in years, but also months, and even days. Many inscriptions also included the date in the Hebrew calendar; for example, “14th Nisan 5648” (26th March, 1888)

Isn’t it a bit morbid to poke around gravestones all day, you might ask? I don’t believe so, and nor did the volunteers, who stooped over the gravestones, measured, photographed and carefully recorded every detail of each resting-place. This historical record helps people who are researching their early ancestors (yes, genealogy is extremely popular these days). A gravestone may be the only record of a family member from centuries ago.

And it is about remembrance. It is about honoring the past and those individuals – men, women and children – who lived and breathed in that past. They were husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. In a sense, I believe, this is giving the ancestors a voice, allowing them to speak again.

Telling their stories. And our ancestors do have extraordinary stories to tell.

I did not see any flowers or offerings on the graves; but many had a stone placed on them, in memory.