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Cemetery at Khartoum, Sudan

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According to an old Jewish legend, Moses spent forty of the years between his initial flight from Egypt and his eventual return to deliver the Israelites as a General and ultimately King in Kush, a territory due south of Egypt that is part of present-day Sudan. Moses was thus, arguably, the first Sudanese Jew. What may be surprising to some is that he was not the last.

The main plot-line of the story of modern Sudanese Jewry spans less than a century, though some of its threads are still playing out. The story begins in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Egypt, then a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, took a renewed interest in the development of the territories to its south. When self-proclaimed Mahdi and rebel leader Muhammad Ahmad bin ‘Abd Allah took Khartoum and nearby Omdurman in 1885, he forcibly converted the eight Jewish families he found there to Islam.

The fall of the Mahdist regime in 1899 to a joint Egyptian-British force, led by General Kitchener, inaugurated the period of Anglo-Egyptian authority over Sudan—a period that lasted until 1956. It was during this period that the Jewish community flourished. Six of the eight forcibly converted families returned to Judaism, forming the nucleus of the renewed community, and new economic opportunity attracted Jews from all over the Arabic-speaking world. After World War I, the bulk of the community gravitated across the Nile, from Omdurman to Khartoum. At its height in the 1930s and early 1940s, the Sudanese Jewish community numbered approximately a thousand souls. It was a very modern community, whose members were primarily retailers, merchants, and senior officials in the British administration.

The community began to decline in earnest after Sudanese independence in 1956, and its dissolution was all but complete by the end of the 1960s. That said, relative to most communities in the Middle East the Jews of the Sudan left slowly and freely, scattering mainly to Israel, the United States, England, and Switzerland.

The final “migration” of Jews out of Sudan took place in May 1977. Members of the Malka, Gaon, Tamman (Tammam), Cohen, and Ishag (Yitzhak) families of expatriate Sudanese Jews obtained the approval of Sudan’s President Ja’far al-Numeiry to airlift the human remains of about a dozen family members from their graves in the Khartoum Jewish cemetery. From there, the remains were transported via Geneva to the Giv’at Shaul Cemetery in Jerusalem, Israel.

Several years ago, Chaim Motzen, a Canadian student in Sudan for an unrelated project, visited the Jewish cemetery in Khartoum, cleaned off some of the gravestones, and worked with the Diarna Geo-Museum to publish the photographs and video tour of the cemetery that accompany this article. The graveyard, established in the early twentieth century, is located in a neglected industrial area in central Khartoum. Most of the grave sites have been ruined, their stones uprooted or smashed, and the cemetery itself serves as a dumping ground for all sorts of refuse, especially discarded auto parts. Amidst the decay, locals have a difficult time recognizing that Jews ever lived in the country. As one young Sudanese commented on a Diarna YouTube video, “I have never heard that Jews were living in Sudan and died there as well! Come on, be real, man. This is not Sudan.”

Given Khartoum’s harsh climate, the cheap materials from which the graves are constructed, and the lack of a local Jewish community to care for the cemetery, it seems likely that the cemetery will continue to deteriorate. There was a real chance that Motzen’s photographs and videos of the Khartoum Jewish cemetery would be the final documentation of the remnants of this cemetery, and of the material remains of Sudanese Jewry as a whole. However, Motzen hopes that this will not be the case. At his request, an American friend, J. Sandler, visited the cemetery in August 2015 and hired a team of local workers to begin cleaning it up. Of the fourteen graves that Motzen documented, at least twelve are still extant, though they have deteriorated further. There is still a need to preserve the cemetery, but it is not too late.

Khartoum (Sudan) Jewish Cemetery, 2005

This clip is a montage of two visits—one in the early morning and one during the daytime. Video courtesy of C. Motzen.

In addition, Motzen recently collaborated with Professor Nahem Ilan, Chair of the Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Ono Academic College – Jerusalem Campus, on a paper that was published in Hebrew in the Israeli quarterly Pe’amim: Studies in Oriental Jewry, published by Yad Ben Zvi. The article documents and deciphers the fourteen graves in Khartoum, the eleven graves marking the remains that were reinterred in Jerusalem, and the graves of other expatriate Sudanese Jews who chose to be buried in that same section of the Giv’at Shaul cemetery. By cross-referencing oral testimonies and other works on Sudanese Jews (mainly Prof. Ilan’s writings on Sudanese Jewry, including an annotated publication of Sudan’s Jewish community registry and several articles on the community’s rabbi of over four decades, Rabbi Shlomo Malka, as well as Eli S. Malka’s Jacob’s Children in the Land of the Mahdi: Jews of the Sudan), Ilan and Motzen are able to contextualize the individuals commemorated by the gravestones within the fabric of Sudanese Jewish life.

Fourteen gravestones offer a very narrow, perhaps insufficient, basis for forming any sort of statistically meaningful conclusions. Nevertheless, and especially when contrasted with the graves in Giv’at Shaul, they collectively provide some insight into the nature of the Jewish community in Sudan. All 21 of the Giv’at Shaul graves are primarily in Hebrew but also contain, at the very least, the English names and Gregorian dates of death of the commemorated. In contrast, there are six monolingual gravestones in the Khartoum cemetery, and at least one in each of four languages (Hebrew, English, Arabic, and French). Of the fourteen legible graves there, eleven contain at least some Hebrew, six at least some Arabic, three at least some English, and three at least some French. One gravestone is trilingual. With regard to dates, half contain both the Hebrew and Gregorian dates, five contain only the Gregorian date, and two contain only the Hebrew date. Thus, even this small sample of gravestones reflects varying degrees of acculturation into both the Arab and European cultures present in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, as well as different levels of preservation of Jewish cultural traditions within this tiny community.

The earliest grave in the Khartoum cemetery is from 1911, and the latest is from 1978, a mere 67 years. Even with that brief interval, eight of the fourteen gravestones record deaths that occurred between 1928 and 1940 (the four remaining graves are from 1923, 1949, 1950, and 1964). In contrast, of the ten reinterred graves that contain dates, seven commemorate deaths that occurred between 1948 and 1962 (the other three occurred in 1928, 1934, and 1942). Taken together, all but three of 24 graves mark deaths that occurred between 1928 and 1964, a period that corresponds to the community’s peak.

Occasionally, the graves tell a different sort of tale. Among the remains reinterred in Jerusalem were those of Rabbi Shlomo Malka, his wife Rabbanit Hanna, and their granddaughter Jenny (Hanna), who tragically died in a fire at the age of 6, in 1942. At least four other members of the Malka family have been buried in Giv’at Shaul, near the reinterred graves. And yet, in the Khartoum cemetery, there remains one grave of a member of the Malka family: that of Shalom Malka, a child born when Rabbi Malka, his great-grandfather died, and who died eleven months later, on the very day that a memorial service was held for Rabbi Malka. The child was buried next to his illustrious great-grandfather.

Sometime after his expedition, Motzen met a woman named Tara Malka at a Shabbat meal in New York City. He asked her if she was related to Rabbi Malka, the Chief Rabbi of Sudan—a question nobody had ever asked her before. Surprised, she answered that indeed she is his great-great granddaughter. Motzen told her about his recent trip and his photographs of what remained of the Khartoum Jewish cemetery, including the gravestone of a child named Shalom Malka. That child, it turned out, was the older brother of Tara’s father. Tara arranged for Motzen to meet her grandmother, Victorine Malka, the mother of the child. The child’s remains were to be reinterred along with the remains of other members of the Malka family in 1977, but they were not. His mother was deeply pained by this and was certain his grave had been ruined or desecrated. Seeing Motzen’s photos of the still-intact grave brought her comfort in her last years. 

Khartoum, Sudan

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