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Flood Damages Beirut’s Only Jewish Cemetery

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December 26, 2019
This picture taken on December 26, 2019 shows a view of graves damaged during bad weather in a winter storm at the Jewish cemetery in the Lebanese capital Beirut. – Entire grave stones spiled onto a street in the Lebanese capital overnight after floods resulting from heavy rainfall damaged the capital’s historic and only Jewish graveyard that dates back to the 1820s. The floods destroyed a retaining wall, dragging gravestones, skeletons and large chunks of rubble onto a sidewalk in the Ras al-Nabaa district. According to a local caretaker, at least four graves were damaged, all of which he said were located in a section of the cemetery holding those buried in the 1940s. (Photo by ANWAR AMRO / AFP) (Photo by ANWAR AMRO/AFP via Getty Images)

(JTA) — Four graves were destroyed and others covered by rubble as a flood swept through Beirut’s only Jewish cemetery.

The flood in the Lebanese capital on Thursday destroyed a retaining wall in the city’s only Jewish cemetery, whose graves date back to the 1820s, according to Agence France-Presse. Most of the cemetery’s 3,407 graves remain intact, according to Nagi Georges Zeidan, an expert on Lebanese Jewry.

Some sarcophagi and headstones were displaced, and rubble covered over other remains. The graves that were destroyed date to the 1940s, according to Zeidan, who volunteers at the cemetery.

Once home to thousands of Jews, Lebanon’s remaining Jewish community numbers only 29 today, Zeidan says.

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