(Jewish Group) A Dutch Jewish cemetery has become a Black pilgrimage site

Each year on the last Wednesday of June, dozens of people arrive by boat at the Jewish cemetery of this picturesque town near Amsterdam to commemorate their ancestors.

The visitors are almost all Black; none are Jewish.

At the cemetery, they play drums, dance, recite Christian prayers and observe rites of Winti, a traditional Afro-Surinamese faith that combines pagan and Catholic traditions. The rites involve blessing water and sprinkling it on the graves.

For the past decade they’ve been coming to Beth Haim, the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Netherlands, because of the discovery here in 2002 of Holland’s earliest known grave of a former slave. A man named Elieser, he died in 1629 and was brought here from Portugal by his Jewish masters, who are buried right alongside him.

Named “Elieser Day” in his memory, the new pilgrimage is centered around the former slave’s gravestone inside the 406-year-old Beth Haim cemetery, a 10-acre swath of swampy meadow. About 26,000 headstones and human remains lie submerged under the mud – an unfortunate result of how Sephardic headstones, which are traditionally placed horizontally, have fared over the centuries in the soft Dutch soil.

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