Studying Gravetones in an Iraqi-Jewish Cemetery

Alexander Slotkin
PhD Candidate, English, University of Florida
Gary R. Gerson Graduate Scholar, Summer 2022

Introduction

Although cemeteries are important in many Jewish communities, gravestones in particular have served as important visual and linguistic texts for many Jewish communities by ensuring that memories of loved ones are preserved over time l’dor v’dor (“from generation to generation”), and that they remain tied to a particular place. For example, the patriarch Jacob erected one of the first Jewish gravestone for his wife Rachel alongside the road to Bethlehem ( Gen. 35:19-20 ), creating a place for their children to seek comfort and to speak with their mother. Sadly, tombstones also tend to represent one of the few material witnesses of a Jewish community’s life (see Figure 1)—a painful truth for me and other members of the Iraqi Jewish community.

Fig. 1: The abandoned Habibiya Jewish cemetery in Baghdad, Iraq (source: The Times of Israel ).

My community, the Iraqi Jewish community, can trace its presence in Iraq to as early as 586 BCE. Many fled Iraq between 1950 and 1951 due to antisemitic and pro-Nazi activity like the Farhud, a series of two-day long anti-Jewish uprisings in Baghdad on Shavuot in which “about 200 Jews were murdered, more than 2,000 [Jews] were wounded, 911 houses where [sic] looted, and 271,301 Dinar of damage caused to shops and warehouses” (Basri 672). Between 125,000 and 160,000 Iraqi Jews lived on their ancestral land prior to the 1950s; today, Iraq’s Jewish population today stands at just four with the recent passing of Dr. Thafer Eliyahu.

Some Iraqi Jews—we sometimes call ourselves, “Babylonian Jews”—fled to relatively nearby countries like Israel or India, with some, including my great grandparents Sabiha and Heskel Saleh (see Figure 2), eventually finding themselves in Long Island, New York.

Fig. 2: A photograph of the Saleh family sitting outside their compound near the Shatt al-Arab River in Basra, Iraq, across the way from Iran. My great-grandmother Sabiha is sitting on the left, holding my grandmother; my great-grandfather Heskel is seated on the right.

While they shared similar experiences fleeing from their homes, Babylonian Jews were not readily welcomed into communities of their European Jewish counterparts who arrived in America shortly before them. In 1940 the American Iraqi Jewish community faced a crisis: a member of their community died and was refused burial in local Jewish cemeteries because he was not affiliated with a Jewish congregation (“ Iraqi Jews in the USA ”). The Iraqi Aid Society, a grassroots organization established in 1934 by early Iraqi Jewish immigrants to provide social, economic, and moral support, purchased a plot of land for the community in the New Montefiore cemetery in 1945. To this day, that plot, and others like it, are exclusively reserved for Iraqi Jews and their families (see Figure 3).

Fig. 3: Left – a stone gate denoting the entrance to the first plot of land purchased by the Iraqi Aid Society (now known as the American Aid Society). Right – a stone marker memorializing the space.

The Project

It is perhaps not surprising that the Iraqi Jewish community in New York is vocal about their fears that Iraqi Jewish life and culture will be forgotten or erased. Shlomo Bakhash, a prominent member of the Babylonian Jewish Center, an organization promoting and preserving Iraqi Jewish heritage, asked in 1999, “Who is to blame for our extinction? Certainly not our forefather, not our grandparents not our parents they did what they had to do to preserve our culture. We are to blame it is us who are facing extinction [sic]” (“ Jews of Iraq, A Will to Survive ”). Eleven years later, Bakhash would share that we managed to unite the Iraqi Community in a way which has not been possible in a very long time. And this is what we are most proud of. We have been successful in pushing back our own extinction for at least 20-30 years. We achieved our initial goal. Now we have to help our children and the future generation to achieve theirs. (“BJC Expansion Project Journal”)

The American Iraqi Jewish community has always needed community organizing and support. But there is presently a need, as one prominent community member told me, to “write about us” as a way of both preserving and learning more about ourselves. I decided as a composition and rhetoric scholar—that is, someone who studies writing and its rhetorical functions—to study and write about my community’s gravestone writing practices.

My dissertation brings composition and rhetoric to bear on gravestones and the cultural information they contain to both preserve and reveal knowledge. My work explores how gravestones frame memories of the deceased by piecing together original and borrowed textual materials (e.g., expressions, icons, and formulations) in ways that present or share a collage of information—a process of writing typically characterized as “assemblage.”

Thanks to the generous support of the University of Florida’s Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies and the Gerson Jewish Studies Scholarship, I was able to photograph over 500 previously unphotographed tombstones from two cemetery plots owned by the Iraqi Jewish community. I would not be able to write my dissertation without these visual documents.

Preliminary Findings

Although it’s too early to share my all of findings, a look through my photographs brings some interesting avenues of inquiry to light.

First Avenue of Inquiry: Linguistic Absences

As with any tombstone, written memories of the deceased, framed by common cultural symbols (e.g., the Star of David) and expressions (e.g., “ת נ צ ב ה”), signal and reflect a community’s unique cultural identity. While I would have expected to encounter tombstones decorated in Baghdad Jewish Arabic—a dialect similar or identical to what my grandmother spoke—only two of the nearly 500 tombstones I visited featured Arabic writing (see Figure 4). What is the significance of not using one’s native tongue to craft and circulate remembrances of the deceased?

Fig. 4: Sasson Shohet’s gravestone, one of only two gravestones I came across that features Arabic script. The Arabic portion reads: “ابن يعقوب-أبونا” or “Son of Jacob – Our Father.”

Second Avenue of Inquiry: Linguistic Collages

Like Sasson Shohet’s gravestone pictured in Figure 4, many of the gravestones I photographed are bilingual (or in this case, trilingual). Moreover, like other gravestones, Sasson’s gravestone does not simply translate information from one language into another. While the English text tells us a bit about who the departed is in relation to his family, the Hebrew text tells us, amongst other things, that Sasson was a prominent member of an important synagogue. How many audiences do bilingual or trilingual gravestones speak to? Was Sasson’s gravestone, for example, written for an English speaking, an Arabic speaking, and a Hebrew speaking audience, respectively? Or was his gravestone written for an audience that can read across all three languages? What is the greater significance of assembling different languages into the same text while, at the same time, selectively translating certain pieces of information?

Third Avenue of Inquiry: Assembled Iconography

Finally, it is clear from studying these gravestones that many of them have identical forms of iconography—visual rather than linguistic forms of writing that convey meaning to readers with the appropriate cultural knowledge to decipher them. A Star of David, for example, is commonly used today to tell mourners that the deceased is Jewish, and typically male. It can be seen in different iterations across multiple tombstones (see Figure 5).

Fig. 5: A gravestone with a Star of David relief circumscribed by a circle.

These relatively ordinary symbols become most interesting when they are borrowed and transformed, such as with the addition of “פּ’נ”, the abbreviation for po nikbar or “here lies.” Coupling the Star of David with the abbreviation for po nikbar (as seen in Figure 6) conveys a slightly different meaning, in this case: “Here lies a Jewish man, Moshe David Shohet.” This pairing suggests that Jewish gravestones generally (and Iraqi Jewish gravestones in particular) draw from a shared pool of cultural knowledge to create new meaning.

Fig. 6: An image of a gravestone featuring the same Star of David featured in Figure 5, with the addition of the abbreviation פּ’נ.

There are more dramatic examples of writers borrowing existing texts and transforming them in new and exciting ways. In Figure 7, for example, we find a Star of David circumscribing the Hebrew word for life: “חי.” This image tells us that the deceased is still alive in our memories, hinted at by the inclusion of a yahrzeit (remembrance) candle in the bottom left-hand corner and the phrase “Forever In Our Hearts.” The inclusion of a dove (a common symbol for peace) and the ten commandments, each represented to the right of the Star of David by the first ten letters in the Hebrew alphabet, suggest that the deceased is both at peace and was a rabbi during their lifetime.

Fig. 7. An example of an assembled text—a written text created by piecing together and adding to already existent textual materials in new and exciting ways.

Conclusion

For rhetoric and writing scholars, the significance of these examples of repetition and transformation, as well as the refusal to translate texts, may rest in what they can teach us about culturally situated forms of writing. For the nearby Iraqi Jewish community, they offer a way to see how representation of ourselves after death changes over time, and the significance behind these changes, such the inclusion of less traditional iconography or phrases on newer gravestones (see Figure 8). Without the generous support of UF’s Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies and the Gerson Jewish Studies Scholarship, neither group would have the opportunity to learn from these important image-texts.

Fig. 8: An image of a gravestone featuring Shakespeare’s Sonnet 109.

Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies