Leading voices in the Sephardi Community have called for a memorial to be built for the 7,000 Jews whose bodies were reburied in unmarked mass graves in what has been described as a shocking contravention of Jewish law.

Historian Simon Schama called the 1974 exhumation of thousands of British Jews from an East End cemetery — including Benjamin Disraeli’s grandfather and the prize fighter Daniel Mendoza — a “sad history” and called for a “proper memorial”.

The remains, were moved to a site in Brentwood, Essex, after the community sold part of its Nuevo cemetery in Mile End, east London, to make way for new Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) buildings in 1973.

Mendoza Boxer - Wiki

Daniel Mendoza, who was buried at Nuevo cemetery (Photo: Wikimedia)

Sir Simon told The Guardian he hoped for a “proper memorial at Brentwood worthy of the thousands of 18th and 19th-century Sephardi Jews who were members of a great Jewish community in Britain”.

The original decision was the responisblity of S&P Community which has now acknowledged for the first time the reburial contravened Jewish law.

Rachel Fink, the community’s chief executive, told the newspaper rabbis had given approval for the move but because many of the graves were more than 200 years old, “bone disarticulation over time may have prevented effective reburial of some individuals, thus contravening Jewish law”.

Writing in 1974, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a leading Jewish legal authority, described the decision to move the bodies a “great wrongdoing”.

The reburial of Jewish remains in this way was “forbidden according to Jewish law”, he said at the time.

Rabbi Mendy Korer, a Chabad chaplain at QMUL, acknowledged that the mass graves did not have stones marking the names of the deceased.

Describing the site the bodies were moved to, he said, the bones lie in “four large pits covered with rocks”, which are “surrounded by a metal railing” and set in land off a busy main road.

Simon Sebag Montefiore Marcus Leoni Folhapress

Simon Sebag Montefiore (Photo: Marcus Leoni Folhapress)

Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, who believes some members of his own family were buried at the cemetery, described the removal and mass burial as a “sad story”.

He told the JC: “We can’t rewrite this unfortunate history, but something should be done.

“There are prominent people here including the famous boxer [Daniel] Mendoza and the leading 18th-century financier Sampson Gideon, who steadied the markets during the panic of 1745.”

Fink said there were previously nameplates at the burial plot of those interred at the Brentwood site but they disintegrated over time, and there are plans “to replace these with a more sustainable memorial”.

The Nuevo cemetery was established in 1725 and was in use until 1920.

A section of the cemetery remains in what is now QMUL, and in 2012 renovations were undertaken to help preserve the area.

Two years later it was awarded a grade II listing by English Heritage .

QMUL said in a statement: “Care and preservation of the cemetery is something we do with pride and in line with our values.”