The remains of thousands of British Jews including Benjamin Disraeli’s grandfather and the prizefighter Daniel Mendoza were reburied in unmarked mass graves to make way for a new university campus.
Half a century later, the Jewish organisation responsible for the graves has for the first time publicly acknowledged that the reburial contravened Jewish law and that there is no lasting memorial to the dead.
The removal of the human remains from what is now the campus of Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) in east London took place in 1973 after the site was acquired for the institution’s expansion.
The bones of more than 7,000 Jewish people who died mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries were placed in four mass graves at the new burial site near Brentwood, Essex, with no stones marking the names of the deceased.
The remains are the responsibility of the S&P Sephardi Community, originally the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community of London, which sold its Nuevo cemetery in Mile End to Queen Mary College, the forerunner of QMUL.
Jewish law requires the remains of each individual be buried as a unit and to not be moved for perpetuity. However, Rachel Fink, the community’s chief executive, said that because “many of the graves [at the Nuevo cemetery] were more than 200 years old, bone disarticulation over time may have prevented effective reburial of some individuals, thus contravening Jewish law”. Rabbis had given approval for the reburial, she said.
A letter from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a leading Jewish legal authority, dated 10 November 1974, said: “I was shocked to hear of the great wrongdoing that happened in London, how a community sold their large cemetery which contained people from multiple past generations. It is widely known that this is forbidden according to Jewish law.”
Simon Schama, the eminent historian, said the reburial in mass graves was “a sad history that can’t be undone”, but added: “What can be hoped for is 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 Nuevo cemetery was established in 1725 and was in use until 1920. It originally covered about three acres and was extended in 1855.
Among those buried there were Mendoza, a celebrated 18th-century boxer; the grandfather of the Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who was also called Benjamin Disraeli; and Sampson Gideon, a wealthy banker and philanthropist.
In the early 1970s, Queen Mary College opened negotiations to buy the disused cemetery from the S&P Jewish community. An act of parliament – the 1973 Queen Mary College Act – authorised the disposal of the burial ground. Under the act, the college was required to make arrangements for the removal of human remains from the site and their reinterment elsewhere.
On 29 August 1973, the college paid £210,000 to the London Sephardi Trust for a 999-year lease for the burial site in Mile End. It paid a further sum of £165,908 plus VAT to the now defunct London Necropolis Company for disinterring, moving and reinterring the human remains.
The job was completed by October 1974, according to minutes of the college standing committee. It is not known what happened to the gravestones of those disinterred.
The site for the reinterment was a small section of a sports ground known as Dytchleys, near Brentwood, that had been bought by the college in 1937. The section was made over to the S&P community by the college governors.
In a statement published in the college student newspaper, CUB, on 5 September 1973, RM Tong, the college registrar, said: “A garden of remembrance will be laid out over the remains [at Dytchleys].” This never happened.
The site now has a sign at its entrance saying “Brentwood cemetery”, and a sign inside the gates asking people to keep out. A wall is inscribed with a Hebrew blessing.
At the rear of the plot are four large, neat areas covered with stones and surrounded by a low railing. There are no markings or names. The rest of the plot is grass.
According to Fink, there were name plates of those interred at the Brentwood site but they disintegrated over time. “There are plans to replace these with a more sustainable memorial,” she said. In the meantime, there is a “community record” of the names.
She said: “Rabbinical leaders of the time were required to provide Jewish legal direction as to the process needed to be undertaken to reinter the bodies.” This would have included ensuring “the remains of each individual were reinterred together”. However, because of the age and the “disarticulation” of the remains, this would have been “complicated”, she said.
“The records are unclear as to the precise reasons for the interment taking this form, but it may have been that the nature of the remains meant that a group burial may have better guaranteed the likelihood of the remnants of each individual being buried together.”
The S&P Sephardi Community was keen to “enhance the memory of those buried there” but the cost was estimated at more than £250,000, Fink said.
The community would welcome donations “for this highly deserving and meaningful project”, she said.
Some human remains and gravestones remained at Mile End, where today they are preserved although surrounded by campus buildings. Under the terms of the lease, QMUL is obliged to keep the area as an open space, and in a neat and tidy condition.
In 2014, the section of the cemetery that remained at QMUL was renovated and became a protected English Heritage site. A spokesperson for the university said: “Care and preservation of the cemetery is something we do with pride and in line with our values.”
A small number of the human remains and their gravestones, including those of Sampson Gideon, were moved to the S&P’s Hoop Lane cemetery in Golders Green, north London.
