Sefaradi Cemetery of Havana, Guanabacoa
This collection indexes the graves recorded at the Sephardic Jewish cemetery in Guanabacoa, across the bay from Havana. Each entry gives the person's name, the dates of birth and death as the headstone gives them, the age the memorial states, and the grave's location within the cemetery where it was noted. Where the stone still carries an inscription, the wording is preserved on the record in the language it was cut in, and every record links to the headstone photograph.
The cemetery is one of two Jewish burial grounds that sit almost side by side in Guanabacoa. This is the Sephardic one, used by the families who came to Cuba from the Ottoman lands (Turkey, Syria, the Balkans) in the early decades of the twentieth century, and who in Havana organised themselves separately from the Yiddish-speaking arrivals from eastern Europe. The Ashkenazi cemetery a short distance away, belonging to the United Hebrew Congregation, is indexed here as the Centro Macabeo collection.
The surnames on these stones show both communities, and the mixing between them. Behar, Barrocas, Bembassat, Esquenazi, Mechulan, Motola, Maya, Taché, Egozi, Bivas, Calahorra and Jerusalmi are Levantine Sephardic names; Feldman, Kaplan, Mindel, Winer, Wolfson, Gribow, Zilberstein, Silberbuch, Krimant, Lipstein and Novigrod came from Poland, Russia and Romania. Several graves carry both a Spanish given name and a Hebrew one: Hazkel Yacub under an inscription reading Yechezkel Yaakov, Regina Winer under Rachel Winer. A few inscriptions are in Spanish alone, addressed to the dead by the family who buried them: Tu esposa y hermanos no te olvidan.
The burials indexed here run from 1925 to 2007 and fall most thickly between the 1940s and the 1970s, the generation that arrived as immigrants and died in Cuba. Not every memorial is complete. Some give only a year of birth and a year of death, in which case the age is a range and is shown as one; some give no birth date at all; and roughly one in ten records the plot number. What the source states is what the record shows.
About the records
The transcriptions come from the memorials recorded for this cemetery on Find a Grave, read against the photographs of the stones themselves. The headstone photographs were taken and contributed by volunteers, and they remain the work of the people who took them: each record links out to the photograph on Find a Grave rather than reproducing it here, and names the contributor who made it.
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