Bath’s long lost community remembered at graveyard ceremony

Rabbi Monique Meyer unveils the plaque (Photo: David Taylor)[Missing Credit]

The Burial Ground was used from 1812, and the last interment is believed to have been in 1941. Today, it is the only remaining physical site of the city’s Jewish heritage, as the synagogue was demolished in the 1960s. On Sunday, the sun shone on beautifully tended graves, as more than 40 people, Jewish and non-Jewish, joined in with memorial prayers and heard the rabbi read the list of 36 names.
 

Rabbi Monique Mayer leads the service at Bath Jewish Burial Grounds (Photo: Keren David)[Missing Credit]

The event was the culmination of four years of research by Christina Hilsenrath, who has written a book, The Jews of Bath, documenting the lives of the small community of watchmakers, silversmiths, tailors, doctors and shopkeepers, who lived and worked in the spa town in the 18th and 19th century. She is on the committee of the Friends of the Burial Ground, who have worked since the 1980s to painstakingly restore the graveyard which was derelict and overgrown.

She embarked on the project after tracing the history of her mother’s family. Klara Ida Hilsenrath came to England in 1939 aged 13 on the Kindertransport. “She was terrified of being Jewish, because if you were Jewish you would get murdered,” she recalled.

“For those of us whose family were killed in the Holocaust, we have nowhere to go, there are often no graves or plaques. But here there are graves that we can care for, and do something to remember the Jewish heritage of this area.”