The Common Grave

The story

The Common Grave stands at the entrance to the Old Cemetery of Beersheba, on Jo Alon Street that leads west to Kibbutz Hatzerim. On the night of 14–15 January 1917 an attack of three British B.E.2 aircraft set out against the airfield and the railway station of Beersheba, and the aircraft dropped six bombs. Jewish railway workers from Jerusalem and from Jaffa, who had remained in the city after a flood damaged the infrastructure of the track, slept out of the cold in an abandoned freight car close to the water tower. Eleven of them were killed on the spot and five died of their wounds the next day; four survived. The sixteen dead, among them two pairs of a father and his son, were buried in a common grave — in one row the members of the Jaffa group and in the second row those of the Jerusalem group. Later some of those buried from among the Jerusalemites were moved for burial on the Mount of Olives, and in the grave are nine of the fallen. Around the plot of the grave and the gravestone rose the first Jewish cemetery of Beersheba, the fruit of the struggle of the Jewish community in the city for Jewish burial in it between the two world wars. The original gravestone was defaced; in 1946 a gravestone of concrete and reinforced iron was erected, and it too disappeared. In the autumn of 1951 the place was fenced anew and the existing gravestone was built, with the help of the Histadrut, the Beersheba municipality and the families. In 1964 a woman died whose husband and son were among those buried, and she received a special permit from the Rabbinate to be buried beside them; she is the last to be buried in the compound. In 1987, on the completion of seventy years since the bombing, a memorial ceremony was held at the place and a commemorative sign was set on the wall of the terminal building of the Turkish station.

• 1917
• Commemoration
• Communities
• Railway
• War
• Cemeteries and graves
• Beersheba