From Daily Star - 09/04/1999

Munira Khayyat

Daily Star staff

The faded letters chiseled in the eroded stone above a gate in Beirut’s old Green Line are in Hebrew and spell out “bet hayameen.” This is the unassuming entrance to Beirut’s Jewish cemetery in Ras al-Nabaa.

In recent months, the cemetery has been given a facelift as Lebanon’s shrunken Jewish community rehabilitates the resting place of its ancestors.

The steps leading up to the graveyard are lined with pot plants, and old trees cast shadows on the white marble gravestones that are inscribed in Hebrew, Arabic and French.

Carved onto each gravestone is a black Star of David or a seven-pronged candleholder, the menorah, symbols of the Jewish religion. Some of the graves in the cemetery have stones on them, silent pointers to the fact that the graves are visited on a regular basis.

Apart from some cracked gravestones and the occasional bullet-hole that testify to the cemetery’s central place in the crossfire of the civil war, it looks peaceful and well preserved.

But until last summer when its renovation began, the Jewish cemetery was a tangled mass of dried grass and barbed wire. “We had to remove 20 years’ worth of weeds that concealed two thirds of the cemetery’s total area,” said the engineer in charge of its restoration, who did not wish to be named.

The graveyard was also barricaded with barbed wire, metal rods and sandbags, and embedded with anti-personnel mines.

According to Um Ali, a refugee from the Bekaa who has lived for eight years in the structure that previously housed the cemetery’s caretaker, the Lebanese army removed the mines and the barricades just over two months ago.

Um Ali observes all the comings and goings of the graveyard. “Very few people come here,” she said.

Um Ali and her son have informally taken over the duties of cemetery guardians. Ali dug the last grave to be used for an elderly man who died in 1997. In the absence of a Rabbi, an elder of the Jewish community presided over the burial.

Um Ali is familiar with all the graves and points to her favorite one. “She was very beautiful” she said of the woman whose likeness is preserved on a gravestone in a far corner of the cemetery.

Um Ali is aware that the Lebanese Jewish community is an ancient one that was very much part of the Lebanese national fabric. “The Jews here are Lebanese like us, they are not like the Israelis,” she said.

The cemetery land is owned by the Lebanese Jewish Community Council and dates back to the 1820s. The engineer in charge of renovations said the cemetery’s renovation was financed by the council. Although there are Jewish cemeteries in Sidon, Tripoli, Aley, and other Lebanese towns that once had prominent Jewish communities, only the Beirut cemetery will be renovated for now.

Plans for the renovation of Beirut’s only remaining synagogue, the Magen Avraham synagogue, in what used to be Wadi Abu Jmeel, are being drawn up and renovations will start later this year. “It seems quite by mistake that the synagogue was spared by the bulldozers `reconstructing’ downtown,” said the engineer. The old Alliance Israelite school which children from all communities attended has gone.

“Life is not easy for Lebanese Jews,” he continued. “There are too many powerful misconceptions about who they are. They prefer to stay quiet and lead quiet lives.

“I did not fix the crumbling Hebrew signpost above the gate. I left it faded and broken so as to not attract attention to it. If I had repainted the Hebrew letters, people would have noticed and most probably objected or defaced the Hebrew writing that is powerfully associated with Israel here.”

The Jews of Lebanon started leaving their country after 1948, but most left after the 1967 war. The civil war and the Israeli invasion escalated this emigration until almost no Jews were left.

Today there are about 100 Lebanese Jews in Lebanon. But the likelihood of the Jewish community regaining its pre-war numbers is small.

“Maybe in 200 years, Lebanese Jews will be able to come back and fully partake in Lebanese society as one of the 19 acknowledged religious confessions in this country” the engineer said. “But right now, the association of Jews with Israel is too deeply embedded.”

Because of the Jewish cemetery’s greenline location and the mines planted in its soil, the cemetery became inaccessible to the diminishing Jewish community during the war. A few gravestones dating back to the mid-1970s and 1980s point to the fact that some Lebanese Jews chose to stay in Lebanon despite the increasing difficulties of being both Jewish and Lebanese in a country at war with Israel and Zionism.

“The problem here is that people are not differentiating between the Jewish religion and Zionism,” according to Joe Mizrahi, the head of the Lebanese Jewish council. “More and more politicians are using the word `Jew’ to indicate the Israeli aggressor. We are not Zionists, we are Lebanese and we are here because we choose to stay in our land.”

Yet the Lebanese Jews who left their homeland and went elsewhere are initiating contact. “Some have relatives buried in the cemetery and have commissioned me to restore their relatives’ graves,” the engineer said.

Um Ali recalled a woman coming to the graveyard one day. “She was carrying rocks in her hands and walking among the graves. I thought she was a tourist so I asked her what she wanted.” Um Ali said. “She replied in broken Arabic that she was here to visit her father. I did not really understand at first but then I realized that she was looking for her father’s grave. “She sat for a long while near the grave and then left. I haven’t seen her since. She must have traveled back to where she now lives.”

COPYRIGHT (c) THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.
(c) 1999 THE DAILY STAR, BEIRUT, LEBANON.
Date: 09/04/1999
Publication: Daily Star

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