The British Military Cemetery

The story

The British military cemetery in Beersheba was established at the end of the First World War, and 1,240 of the fallen of the British Empire who fell in the area in the Sinai and Land of Israel campaign against the Ottoman Empire were buried in it; among them 206 ANZAC soldiers, of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. At first 139 of the fallen of the Battle of Beersheba were buried at the place, and among them an officer with the rank of captain of Jewish descent, Seymour van den Bergh, on whose gravestone a Star of David is engraved; after the establishment of the cemetery, fallen soldiers were transferred to it from nine further temporary cemeteries. Beside the entrance gate appears an inscription in the three official languages of the British Mandate government. Inside the cemetery stands the airmen's monument — a monument in the form of a truncated pyramid that the Turks erected as a mark of respect to eight British airmen who were killed in battle against them. The British found it after the war, restored it and set it here; at its top is engraved the emblem of the Royal Air Force and beneath it the names of the fallen and the date of their fall. The cemetery was built by Jewish pioneers: the Zionist Commission of the Zionist Organization won the tender for the building of the military cemeteries in the country, and on its behalf three groups worked here, the largest of them that of the Gdud HaAvoda, and the Mandate government approved their work officially. Every year, on 31 October, the Beersheba municipality holds a memorial service at the place on the anniversary of the Battle of Beersheba, and representatives of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Germany and South Africa take part in it. At the southern end of the cemetery the ANZAC Memorial Centre was dedicated.

• 1917
• Commemoration
• British Mandate
• Cemeteries and graves
• War
• Beersheba