Cemetery Archives: Jewish Cemetery Plashet Park

Inexplicably, I found this open on a Saturday. Apart from a fox who sat and watched me as I watched him, there was no one else to be seen in the cemetery. The small, rectangular ground crammed with gravestones in neat rows, a central path running between them, was the first Jewish cemetery I ever visited. I found the stark dryness quite overwhelming; I hadn't yet learned to see the more subtle details of the Jewish memorial tradition, not least the wonderful habit of leaving a stone on the gravestone when you visit (so much nicer that flowers rotting in cellophane).

About a year after I visited, the cemetery was desecrated by vandals. I worried (wrongly, I think, or I wouldn't have put the photos back online) that they had used my website to find somewhere to target.

Notes written in 2011.