Exhuming remains of 7,000 Sephardi Jews was ‘contravention of Jewish law'

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.