The Old Jewish Cemetery Prague is located in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague, beside the Pinkas Synagogue and close to the Old-New Synagogue. It is one of the oldest surviving Jewish burial grounds in Europe and one of the most important material records of Jewish life in Prague.

The cemetery was probably established in the first half of the fifteenth century. Its exact foundation date is not known. The oldest preserved tombstone belongs to Rabbi and poet Avigdor Kara, also known as Avigdor Karo, and is dated 1439.

The Old Jewish Cemetery Prague as a burial ground

From the fifteenth century onward, the cemetery became the main burial ground of the Jewish community of Prague. It served this function for more than three centuries, until burials there ended in 1787.

Its unusual appearance is the result of restricted space inside the Jewish Town and the religious prohibition against disturbing graves. When no more room was available, layers of earth were added above older burials. New tombstones were then placed on the higher surface, while earlier graves remained below.

For this reason, the cemetery contains several burial layers. According to some researchers, the burials may reach up to ten levels deep. More than 12,000 tombstones survive above ground, but the number of people buried there is much higher.

The stones preserve Hebrew inscriptions, dates, family names, professions, symbols and references to communal status. Earlier tombstones are generally simpler. Later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century monuments often include richer decoration, relief lettering and symbolic imagery.

Rabbis, scholars and communal leaders

The cemetery records the history of Prague’s Jewish elite, including scholars, printers, physicians, rabbis and communal leaders. Mordecai Maisel, one of the great benefactors of the Jewish Town, enlarged the cemetery in the late sixteenth century by purchasing adjoining property. He died in 1601 and was buried there.

Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal of Prague, died in 1609 and was also buried in the cemetery. His grave became one of the most visited places in the site, connected to his religious and philosophical writings and to later traditions surrounding the Golem of Prague.

Other major figures buried in the cemetery include David Gans, who died in 1613. He was a Jewish historian, mathematician and astronomer connected to the intellectual world of Rudolfine Prague. David Oppenheim, who died in 1736, was Chief Rabbi of Prague and an important collector of Hebrew manuscripts and books. His library later became part of the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

From Josefov to the Jewish Museum in Prague

After burials in the Old Jewish Cemetery ended in 1787, the main burial activity of the Prague Jewish community shifted to Žižkov. A Jewish cemetery had already been established there in 1680 as a plague burial ground. It continued in use until 1890, when the New Žižkov Jewish Cemetery opened at the Olšany Cemeteries.

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Josefov underwent major urban redevelopment. Much of the old Jewish Town was demolished. However, the Old Jewish Cemetery survived, together with several synagogues and communal buildings that later became central to the Jewish Museum in Prague.

The Jewish Museum in Prague was founded in 1906 by Salomon Hugo Lieben and August Stein. Its early collection was formed from objects preserved from synagogues demolished during the clearance of the Prague Jewish ghetto. The cemetery itself remained a burial ground and historical monument, not a museum building, but it later became part of the preserved ensemble of Jewish monuments in Josefov.

During the Nazi occupation, the Jewish Museum Association was abolished, and the museum’s collections were taken over by the Prague Jewish community. In 1942, the Central Jewish Museum was created. Although approved by the Nazi authorities for their own purposes, it preserved liturgical objects, books and archival documents from destroyed Jewish communities during the war.

After the war, the museum came under state control and was nationalized in 1950. It remained restricted under the Communist regime. In 1994, after the fall of Communism, the Jewish Museum in Prague regained independence from the state, and its buildings and collections were returned to Jewish communal ownership and administration.

Today, the Old Jewish Cemetery Prague is part of the Prague Jewish Town circuit of the Jewish Museum in Prague. It is visitable together with the historic synagogues and exhibitions of Josefov, preserving the burial record of Prague’s Jewish community from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.

Rawalpindi War Cemetery, set within the older Protestant burial ground known locally as Gorah Qabrastaan, is one of the principal Commonwealth war cemeteries in present-day Pakistan. It contains burials connected mainly with military operations on the North-West Frontier, at a time when Rawalpindi functioned as an important garrison and logistical center of the British imperial system in the Punjab. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the cemetery contains 257 Commonwealth burials from the First World War and 101 from the Second World War.

The cemetery is historically important not only because of the number of military burials it contains, but also because it preserves, in stone, the wider geography of imperial war in South Asia. The men buried there came from different regiments and different parts of the British world. However, they were brought together in Rawalpindi because the city served as a military hinge between the Punjab and the frontier. In this context, the cemetery is not only a burial ground, but also a record of how empire, mobility, conflict, and death were organized in this part of the subcontinent.

Religious identity at Rawalpindi War Cemetery

Like other Commonwealth war cemeteries, Rawalpindi War Cemetery follows a standardized commemorative system. Headstones normally record the name, rank, regiment or service, date of death, and religious emblem of the individual. This matters because the cemetery preserves not only military identities, but also visible religious distinctions among the dead. Most graves follow Christian commemorative forms, while others may carry different religious signs, including the Star of David on Jewish graves. Even within a highly uniform military landscape, religious belonging could still be materially acknowledged.

Jewish Graves:

Joseph Michaels

Among the Jewish graves that can currently be discussed with confidence, Joseph Michaels is the best documented. Jewish military remembrance records identify him as born in London on 9 December 1895. He served in the 2nd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry and died on 20 June 1919. He is listed as buried in Rawalpindi War Cemetery, grave 4.A.4. His grave connects Rawalpindi not only to the British military presence in India, but also to the wider history of British Jewish service in the First World War and its aftermath.

Thomas Edward Haresnape

A second grave, that of Pioneer Thomas Edward Haresnape of the Royal Engineers, has also been associated with Jewish commemoration at Rawalpindi. His burial in the cemetery is documented, and local historical material from Huddersfield preserves aspects of his civilian and military background. However, his specifically Jewish biography is less securely documented than that of Joseph Michaels. For that reason, the strongest way to read his case is through the material evidence of commemoration itself, especially where the headstone is identified with a Jewish emblem.

Rawalpindi War Cemetery and Jewish Presence in Pakistan

For the history of Jewish presence in Pakistan, Rawalpindi War Cemetery is a small but meaningful site. Its Jewish significance does not depend on the existence of a large local Jewish community there. Rather, it lies in the way Jewish soldiers were incorporated into, and made visible within, the imperial military burial system of British India.

The Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Estrela is the first Jewish burial ground of modern Lisbon, created at a time when Jewish presence as a public religious practice was still fragile and recent. In the early 19th century, small groups of Jews, mainly from Morocco and Gibraltar, began to resettle in Portugal, with communities forming in Lisbon, the Azores, and Faro. In Lisbon, many cautiously retained British citizenship, a factor that helps explain the cemetery’s connection to the grounds of the British Cemetery in Estrela.

In 1801, a small plot of land was obtained within the British Cemetery of Estrela to allow burials according to Jewish ritual. The earliest identified grave is that of José Amzalaga, who died on 26 February 1804, as recorded in the epitaph. For approximately six decades, this was the main burial place for the Jewish population of Lisbon, until 1865, when the space became saturated.

From a material perspective, the cemetery is small in scale, with around 150 graves, mostly marked by horizontal gravestones in the Sephardic tradition. Cleaning and stabilization actions were recorded, including the consolidation of walls, during interventions carried out in the 2010s.

Jewish funerary continuity in the city was reorganized from 1868 onward, when a royal decree authorized the creation of a new cemetery on Calçada das Lages, today Avenida Afonso III, which remains the active cemetery of the community. Later, in 1892, the statutes of the Guemilut Hassadim Association were ratified, assigning it the mission of providing religious and funerary support and of administering both cemeteries, the one at Rua Nova à Estrela and the one at Calçada das Lages, including death records.

Today, the former cemetery remains largely invisible and is, in practice, not open to visitors, even when visiting the British Cemetery itself, where the Jewish graves are explicitly described as inaccessible.

In recent years, the surrounding urban context has brought the site back into public debate. The transformation of the so-called English Quarter into a private residential complex includes reference to the former Jewish cemetery and a proposal to keep it covered by a landscaped pergola, specifically to reduce its visibility from the surrounding residences. Public discussion around the project highlighted a risk: rather than valuing and explaining this heritage, the architectural solution may end up making it even less visible.

As a closed and discreet site, this cemetery nevertheless retains exceptional historical value, not only as a physical trace of the Jewish return to Lisbon in the 19th century, but also as a material marker of a city in which the normalization of modern Jewish life had to be built step by step, even before the formal abolition of the Inquisition in 1821.

Set on a slope facing the Nistru (Dniester) River, the Jewish cemetery of Vadul-Rașcov is one of those places where the landscape itself becomes part of the archive. Recent documentation estimates around 2,500 tombstones and identifies at least four sectors, separated by traces of ditches and walls, indicating distinct phases of use and expansion of the burial ground.

The local Jewish community took shape around the mid-eighteenth century, and the cemetery contains burials dating from at least 1746–1747; the most recent dated tombstone is from 1955. Overall, inscriptions are predominantly in Hebrew, with rare bilingual examples (Hebrew and Russian) appearing in the later records.

Beyond its historical value, there is a solid body of data. The JewishGen project (Bessarabia SIG) began systematic documentation in 2017 and published a final report (phases 1 and 2) indexing 1,927 graves, with thousands of photographs and a significant number of “unknown” graves, unidentified at the time of recording, a valuable resource for genealogy and social history.

Protection and contemporary interpretation: in December 2023 the cemetery was entered into the National Register of Monuments, and in 2024 an official inspection was carried out to assess the condition of the site and its fencing, with a view to restoration and safety measures. In parallel, the Jewish History Museum of the Republic of Moldova has promoted the idea of an “open-air museum” at the cemetery itself, with an interpretive center dedicated to the shtetl and local memory.

The Jewish Cemetery of Faro is one of the main material testimonies to the reorganization of Jewish life in the city during the 19th century. It is associated with a community described in heritage sources as prosperous at the time, comprising around sixty families, which established its own communal spaces, including the cemetery.

The site’s contemporary recognition is directly linked to the recovery process initiated in the late 20th century. The graves and inscriptions were inventoried and translated by members connected to the Lisbon Jewish Community (CIL) in 1980. In 1984, the Faro Cemetery Restoration Fund, Inc. was created and promoted the restoration of the enclosure. The reconsecration took place on May 16, 1993, in a ceremony attended by the then President of the Republic, Mário Soares, and the site also began to be presented as the “Israelite Museum.”

It is within this context that the mini museum was created. Inside the cemetery there is a small building identified as the former tahará, a space traditionally used for the ritual washing of bodies and for prayers, which today functions as a museological nucleus and interpretive center. Part of this interpretive component includes an area described as a “synagogue,” where a Jewish wedding is recreated, an exhibition resource designed to explain religious practices and communal memory to visitors.

Regarding the content of the mini museum, reference documentation on Jewish heritage in Portugal notes that it was assembled as part of the 1992–1993 restoration. The exhibition includes furniture originating from former synagogues in Faro, reinforcing the connection between communal history and the material culture that has largely disappeared from the urban fabric. In terms of management and continuity, academic and institutional sources record the “Jewish Historical Center of Faro” as a museological facility associated with the Lisbon Jewish Community, open to the public since 1993. The CIL indicates that it currently ensures the maintenance and administration of the site.

Lisbon’s main active Jewish cemetery is located on Rua Afonso III, in the area historically linked to Calçada das Lages. It stands as a key landmark in the reconstitution of Jewish communal life in the city during the 19th century, when small groups of Jews began settling in Portugal again, even before the official abolition of the Inquisition in 1821.

According to the Lisbon Jewish Community’s own records, in 1868 King Luís granted “the Jews of Lisbon permission to establish a cemetery for the burial of their fellow Jews.” This authorization formalized Calçada das Lages (today associated with Afonso III) as the community’s central burial ground, a document of both religious continuity and the gradual public reappearance of Jewish life in Lisbon.

The cemetery’s history is closely linked to communal organization. In 1892, the Civil Government charter ratified the statutes of the Guemilut Hassadim Association, founded by Moses Anahory, responsible for mutual aid and funerals. The association managed burials, oversaw the two cemeteries, and kept the death registers, ensuring that Jewish burial practice and documentation remained organized across generations.

This site also connects to an earlier chapter of modern Jewish Lisbon. A small Jewish plot was obtained in the Estrela cemetery area in 1801, and the first recorded grave there was José Amzalaga, who died on February 26, 1804. That earlier plot served the community until the mid 19th century, when the Calçada das Lages cemetery became the principal active cemetery.