A fragment of a tombstone from the Jewish cemetery in Khartoum, Sudan. Photo: YouTube screenshot.
“I kept thinking that these were people’s families, aunts, uncles and parents,” said Chaim Motzen of Sudan’s only Jewish cemetery, which he rediscovered and has successfully restored following decades of neglect and desecration.
The cemetery is located in Khartoum, where there was once a small but thriving Jewish community mostly composed of Jews from Muslim countries.
But after an eruption of antisemitism across the Muslim world following Israel’s creation in 1948 forced the Jews out, the cemetery was over time all but destroyed, and turned into something both garbage dump and public toilet.
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After the Arab-Israeli conflict began in the 1950s, Sudan’s Jews fled – there was almost no trace of the community left except the small Jewish graveyard in downtown Khartoum
Credit: AFP
When people around the cemetery saw a student peering at the mass of broken graves they started yelling at him – “Jew, Jew, Jew.”
Chaim Motzen had trekked through Khartoum to pay his respects at the city’s little known Jewish graveyard, but he could only stay a few minutes.
The plucky Canadian student did not give up. He snuck back to the burial site at dawn to see how it had been turned into a rubbish dump, piled high with mounds of filth.