The Novo (Nuevo) Sephardic Jewish cemetery in the East End of London was registered on April 11 on the list of the UK’s historic parks and gardens.
According to the English Heritage web site:
The Novo Cemetery has been inscribed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
— Historic interest: as the sole remaining portion of one of Britain’s earliest post-Resettlement Jewish cemeteries, whose connection with the London Sephardi community goes back nearly three centuries;
— Landscape interest: as the expression of distinctive Sephardi burial practices, and especially the avoidance of all upright monuments;
— Rarity: one of only two exclusively Sephardic cemeteries in England;
— Location and group value: part of a cluster of early Jewish burial grounds in the Mile End area, within the historic heartland of London Jewry.
Writes the Jewish News online web site:
Veronica Fiorato, English Heritage designation team leader for the south said:“The Novo is a most unusual landscape and a distinctive and austere cemetery which epitomizes a sense that death is the ultimate leveler. The grid layout of tombs, which are deliberately non-hierarchical, expresses this minority community’s approach to commemorating its dead in a striking yet understated manner and the rarity of this form of cemetery means that its national importance is clear.”
Heritage Minister Ed Vaizey said:”This cemetery is one of only two in England devoted to the Sephardic branch of Jewry and displays the unique characteristics of their burial practices. It’s connection to the Sephardic Jewish community going back to the 18th century means it is absolutely worthy of its Grade II listed status.”
Located in East London’s Mile End district, the cemetery was established in 1733 and expanded in 1855; the original 18th century part was demolished in the 1970s, and today the remaining 19th century section is totally situated within the grounds of Queen Mary College.
From the time of its establishement
virtually all Sephardi burials in London took place here, including those of Diego Pereira, Baron Aguilar (1699-1759), financier and adviser to the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa; the merchant Benjamin D’Israeli (1730-1816), grandfather and namesake of the great Victorian prime minister, and Daniel Mendoza (1764-1836), celebrated prizefighter and author of the first English boxing textbook. […]
By the early 20th century the area immediately to the west of the Novo had become the home of Queen Mary College, the successor to the ‘People’s Palace’ of 1887 and by now a part of the University of London.
The college too had outgrown its site, and negotiations to acquire and develop the now-defunct cemetery were under way from the 1940s, although legal obstacles – and objections by some members of the Jewish community – delayed the purchase until 1972. The ‘old’ (1733) part of the Novo was cleared, with the remains of about 7,000 people carefully excavated and reburied on college-owned land near Brentwood in Essex. The 1855 portion of the cemetery, its occupants more recently deceased and hence more likely to have living relatives, largely escaped redevelopment, becoming a fenced-off enclave surrounded by the new library and faculty buildings of the expanded college, which holds a 999-year lease on the site. Its boundaries were re-landscaped in 2011 by Andrew Abdulezer of Seth Stein Architects, in collaboration with the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation of London.
Click here for full details and description on the English Heritage web site
Click here for article in the Jewish News online web site
1 comment on “Historic Sephardic cemetery in London given UK listed (landmark) status”
This is a most haunting and wonderful place. It roots British Jewish experience. Yet the Jews were never officially allowed back to England and this begs the existential question – are we really here?
Looking at this cemetery the answer has to be yes!