The Old Cemetery

The story

The Old Cemetery is the veteran Jewish cemetery of Beersheba, whose beginning is in the days of the First World War. It lies on the western outskirts of the city, on both sides of Jo Alon Road that leads to Kibbutz Hatzerim, between the neighborhoods of Neve Ze'ev, Neot Lon and Neighborhood Tet. Since the founding of Beersheba in 1900, and all the more during the war, a small Jewish community took shape in the city, which buried its dead in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron or at the Ruhama farm — two expensive and cumbersome options. In the winter of 1916 the members of the community succeeded, with the help of public figures from Jerusalem headed by the Rishon LeZion Rabbi Nissim Yehuda Danon and Yosef Hai Panizel, in leasing a plot of land about eight hundred meters west of the city, on the road leading to Khan Yunis. In the spring they began to bury in it Jews who had died of the epidemics that prevailed in the city. On 15 January 1917 the Turkish railway station was bombed, and sixteen Jewish workers who were killed were buried in the plot in a common grave. In November 1919 the area of the cemetery was fenced. After the 1929 riots the Jewish community in the city dispersed, and Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel held that one must fight for the land in order to preserve the foothold in the place; the Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac HaLevi Herzog ruled that the graves must not be moved. The gravestones were desecrated again and again, and the cemetery was destroyed with the entry of the Egyptian army in 1948. In 1950 the mayor David Tuviyahu decided to establish the city's cemetery officially at the place, and thirteen dunams were allotted to it. It was the only Jewish cemetery in the Negev, and served until a new cemetery was dedicated in 1986.

• Communities
• 1917
• British Mandate
• People
• Cemeteries and graves
• Beersheba