A Tale of Two Jewish Cemeteries: Preservation of Jewish Historic Heritage in the Caribbean

Abstract

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• A Tale of Two Jewish Cemeteries:Preservation of Jewish Historic Heritage in the Caribbean
• Ronald Gomes Casseres (bio)

It has been 370 years since the first Jews settled in Curaçao. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the island's Jewish community was the largest in the Americas with some 1500 Jews.¹ In 1789, notwithstanding a decrease in the number of Jews due to emigration and based on more accurate census figures, Jews still represented 14% of the free population and 30% of the white population.² Unlike in other centers of Jewish life, however, over the course of these more than three and a half centuries, more than six thousand Jews were interred in just two cemeteries, the historic Beth Haim Bleinheim and the contemporary Beth Haim Berg Altena.³ Study of the tombs concentrated in Curaçao's two Jewish burial sites thus provides a unique window onto the changing practices and customs of this Jewish community.

Cemeteries tell us more than who lived, who died, and when they did so. A study of cemeteries, referred to as bet ḥayims in Sephardic tradition, also tells us about how many of the interred lived their lives.⁴ The sepulchral monuments and inscriptions of Curaçao's cemeteries provide a glimpse of Jewish life, including the religious and social practices of those [End Page 575] resting there. This article will show how burial and naming customs of the Jewish community evolved and to some extent became more secular in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The historic Beth Haim Bleinheim, established in 1651, was the first Jewish cemetery in Curaçao. It lies in the former Joden Quartier, or Jewish quarter, where the first Jews settled and continued to live and own plantations well into the nineteenth century, located two miles from the capital and main city of the island, Willemstad. The establishment of a Reform bet ḥayim at Berg Altena two hundred years later in the outskirts of the city attests to the vehemence of the internal conflicts within this often contentious Jewish community. A third cemetery, also at Berg Altena, was founded in 1880, when Orthodox Jews moved to this neighborhood and wanted a new cemetery closer to where they resided. The two cemeteries at Berg Altena, the first part of a Reform community and the second an Orthodox community, were merged into one in the middle of the twentieth century.

BETH HAIM BLEINHEIM

Much has been written about the history of Curaçao's Jewish community and about the old cemetery, Beth Haim Bleinheim.⁵ Isaac Emmanuel's Precious Stones of the Jews of Curaçao is the definitive study of the cemetery and the genealogy of Curaçao's Jews.⁶ The book offers detailed descriptions of 225 representative epitaphs with associated biographies of the deceased, as well as fifty photographs of tombstones, or details thereof, all taken and recorded from 1936 to 1941. It also contains a detailed map and extensive descriptions of the cemetery, funerary art, and local burial societies, as well as a catalogue of the deceased buried in the 2570 graves that Emmanuel was able to identify (see figure 1).⁷ [End Page 576]

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View full resolution Figure 1.

Beth Haim Bleinheim overview.

Beth Haim Bleinheim is thought to have been founded no later than in 1659, although the oldest known inscription on a tomb at Bleinheim is from 1668.⁸ It is likely that there were burials in the period from 1651 to 1668, but if these tombs had ledger stones, they either did not survive or settled deep below the surface of the ground. Beth Haim Bleinheim is the oldest walled-in Jewish cemetery in the Americas and the oldest continually used Jewish cemetery in the Americas.⁹ After 1880, however, Beth Haim Bleinheim was used only sporadically. The last Sephardic Jew buried at Beth Haim Bleinheim appears to be Arturo Cohen Henriquez in 1950; his ancestors included several well-known last names in Curaçao's Sephardic history: Levy Maduro, Abinun de Lima, and Lopez Henriquez, in addition to his own Cohen Henriquez. The very last burial at Beth Haim Bleinheim was...