Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Jewish Graves Over the Past Four Centuries in Jerusalem

'Helkat Mehokek' is a Hebrew book by Asher Leib Brisk published in 1913. It includes tombstones inscriptions from part of the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem.

The Israel Genealogical Society (IGS) is proud to announce that Helkat Mehokek has been completely indexed and computerized. The result is a bi-lingual (Hebrew-English) searchable database of 8,092 tombstones, mostly covering the period of 1740-1906, while the earliest inscription dates from 1646.

There are 1,500 graves of Sephardim and 6592 of Ashkenazim.

The inscriptions listed by Brisk cover graves from the top part of the Mount of Olives Cemetery, a part that has totally been destroyed under Jordanian rule (1948-1967) to make room for the building of a hotel and a road. The destruction of the tombstones thereby makes this book the only source for some of this information. Some of the information can be found in records of the various Hevra Kadishas in Jerusalem.



The database is located on IGS English website.

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