The Cemetery
Item
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Name
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The Cemetery
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Dates
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1749 - Unknown
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Location
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Portsmouth & Southsea
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Type
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Cemetery
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Description
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Fawcett Road, originally called ‘Jew’s Lane’ before it was renamed in 1881, is home to Portsmouth’s Jewish Cemetery.
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Established in 1749 for the growing community, it is the oldest documented Anglo-Jewish burial ground outside of London. The current ohel (a small chapel where funeral services are conducted) on the site was built in 1881. The oldest tombstone still standing today is from 1763, for ‘the child Alexander, son of Isaac’.
Most of the tombs have Hebrew inscriptions on one side, and, unusually, English inscriptions on the other, perhaps reflecting a desire to integrate with the language of their new home country, as most of the interred would have immigrated from Iberia or the Netherlands from the seventeenth-century onwards, to reestablish legal Jewish life in England after their readmission in 1656.
