The Necropolis

My neighborhood has seen some changes in the years I’ve been away, but there is one feature that has remained constant for decades.  That is the place I always knew simply as “the Jewish Cemetery”.  This plot of land lies only a “hoot and a holler” from my house and is located on Enon Ridge.  I’ve walked past it countless times, but never set foot on its grounds until I moved back to Birmingham.  I went to satisfy my curiosity and discovered a place brimming over with its own history and mysteries.

First I should give a little background.  Jews have played a prominent and significant role in the history of the South.  They were among the first to colonize the next door state of Georgia back in the eighteenth century.  Georgia was a colony founded by James Oglethorpe as a refuge for English debtors and was named for King George II.  Debtors did come there and worked off their obligations on the farms and plantations that were established or by starting businesses of their own that created the revenue they used to pay their creditors.  The opportunities all these circumstances created drew many Jews into the colony and their communities flourished.

It was likewise in Alabama where Jews rose to prominence in the state’s towns and cities.  When Alabama seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy, Jewish thinkers were part of the movement and guided its efforts.  One of them, a man named Judah Benjamin, was called “the dark prince of the Confederacy” by Nathaniel Hawthorne for his role in the Civil War.  After the war ended, Alabama began a difficult and painful rebuilding but there was one event that helped considerably.  That was the founding of Birmingham in 1872.

Birmingham is the only place known on Earth where all three ingredients for the making of steel can be found: iron ore, coal and limestone.  They exist in abundance in the area and that brought all kinds of people to the city.  The invention of the Bessemer converter and blast furnaces greatly aided the steel manufacturers and business began to grow, so much so that Birmingham became known as “the Pittsburgh of the South” and renowned both for the quantity and quality of the steel it produced.  Both of my grandfathers worked in Birmingham’s steel mills as did so many thousands of other African-American men who flocked to the city for the jobs the steel industry created.

Jews came as well, and they rose to prominence in the city’s business community.  They started banks and department stores; opened law firms and created other enterprises that contributed much to Birmingham’s political, commercial and cultural life.  But despite their many gifts to the city, they faced discrimination as well—in life and in death.  The cemetery on Enon Ridge was an expression of the anti-Semitism Jews encountered here.  Their dead had to have a separate burial ground as interment with Christians would not be allowed.

I visited this necropolis on an unusually mild June morning recently.  Eleventh Court neatly bisects it and on the day I came, a groundskeeper was duly cutting back on the plant growth which encroached upon the gravestones.  The two lots lie north and south of the thoroughfare and are enclosed by low but solid stone walls.  I visited the north lot first.  The gate was open and over it was an iron work arch bearing the words “Cemetery Knesses Israel”.  As I walked, I took note of names and dates and tried to discern what they told me of those resting here.  The names were of a kind I had known:  Avram, Jaffe, Weinberger and others. 

I did not visit every grave, but the ones I examined all had interesting information.  Many bore inscriptions in both English and Hebrew.  It was also clear that entire families were laid to rest here with the patriarch and matriarch having more prominent headstones and their children very simple ones, but all of them were together.  One old grave I saw contained the remains of a man who had passed away on 30 December 1901.  Another was occupied by a man who had died at the ripe old age of 95 in the first third of the twentieth century.

As I walked around, I recalled the story my mother had told me of playing hide-and-seek among these very same tombstones when she was a girl some seventy years ago.  The graveyard wasn’t as full then as it is now but her story made me realize just how integral a part this place has played in the history of the area.  I wandered around a little more and then crossed the street to visit the southern lot.

This one also had an arched entrance with the words “Cemetery Emanu El” spanning it.  Again there was the catalogue of Jewish names:  Gluck, Fies, Friedman, Saks and Seigel being some of them.  The words on the arches made me wonder if these plots were two separate cemeteries created because of some schism that might have opened in Birmingham’s Jewish community.  That is something worth investigating.  As I walked, looked, and contemplated, I realized that here was a lot of history literally resting at my feet.  These once had been men and women who had seen things I had read about and survived.

One tombstone of particular interest to me told a remarkable tale in just a few words:  “Born in Perth, Australia and died in Birmingham, Alabama”.  I’ll bet this woman could have told me stories that would have kept me riveted in my place as she related them.  Then there was the tomb of a woman who had been born in 1817, two years before Alabama became a state!  She had lived through the Civil War and died toward the end of the nineteenth century.

All around me were the graves of people who had seen the invention of the locomotive, the telegraph, and the telephone.  They had witnessed the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and both world wars.  They had survived the Great Depression and other economic and political upheavals.  They had loved and hated; had sown and reaped, and now were at rest.  I thought about all of that under the bright Alabama sky while birds sang and twittered in the trees and bushes that grow along the western walls of both plots.

As I walked away I remembered something else about this necropolis:  It had saved my neighborhood from extinction.  Family and neighbors told me that back in the 1960s when the state and federal government were in the planning stages of building the Interstate highways that now flow through Birmingham, our little neighborhood was firmly in the crosshairs of the planning engineers.  What saved our homes and businesses was the Jewish cemetery.

The families of the dead rose up en masse and told government authorities that there was no way they would allow the rest of their people to be disturbed.  The original plans put the highway pavement on top of those graves and that meant remains would have to be exhumed and reburied elsewhere.  At that time the affected families still had a lot of political muscle and they used it to save the cemetery.  The cemetery’s salvation was also our own and our homes were spared.  As it is the Interstate is literally a stone’s throw from my front door but at least it didn’t run through my kitchen and for that I’m grateful.

My mother says that burials still take place in the necropolis and I can see that its upkeep has made it a green gem in our community.  I want to visit again to see if I can find other interesting stories on the gravestones.  They will say much about the people and the times they lived and deepen my appreciation for the humanity we all share.