Some fifteen years ago, a Canadian named Chaim Moetzen came to Khartoum in search of the remnants of the city’s Jewish graveyard—which had been transformed into a garbage dump—but was chased off by cries of “Jew!” Since the fall of Sudan’s Islamist dictatorship in 2019, and the opening of relations with Israel, Moetzen has returned to clean up the site and reconstruct its tombstones. Will Brown writes:
Sudan has a small but rich Jewish history. In the 1900s, hundreds of Arabic-speaking Jews from across the Middle East lived in the Sudanese capital harmoniously alongside Muslims and Christians, working as merchants, business folk, doctors, and lawyers. . . . But when the Arab-Israeli conflict began in the 1950s, a flood of anti-Semitism washed across the Arab world, forcing nearly all of Sudan’s Jews to flee.
Many arrived in Israel, Geneva, London, and the U.S. as stateless refugees and by the 1980s, there was almost no trace of the community left except the small Jewish graveyard in downtown Khartoum. When the Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir came to power in 1989, the community’s heritage came under attack like never before.
No one quite knows what happened to the graveyard. But it’s clear that many of the tombstones were smashed into thousands of pieces, most probably by anti-Semites. Other marble slabs were looted and local authorities allowed the site to become a dumping ground.
Motzen asked for and immediately got permission from the minister of religious affairs, Nasr Eldeen Mofarih, . . . to restore the site as a private individual in January 2020. He paid for a Sudanese archaeologist and dozens of workers out of his own pocket and got to work. Over several weeks they removed some fourteen trucks of almost everything imaginable from the site. “There were about five metric tons of glass, car parts, a crazy amount of dirt, medical waste, lots of scorpions, and even beehives,” he says.
Read more on Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people/khartoums-secret-cemetery-piecing-together-fragments-lost-jewish/