Sefaradi Cemetery of Havana, Guanabacoa
This collection indexes 836 burial entries from the Sephardic Jewish cemetery in Guanabacoa, across the bay from Havana, drawn from two different sources. 57 entries come from the memorials recorded for the cemetery on Find a Grave: they give the person's name, the dates of birth and death as the headstone gives them, the age the memorial states and, where it was noted, the grave's location. Where the stone still carries an inscription, the wording is preserved on the record in the language it was cut in, and each of these records links to the headstone photograph. The other 779 entries come from the cemetery's own burial register, as a volunteer transcribed it for JewishGen: most give a name, a grave location and a year of death, and a few add an age or a short note.
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 memorials indexed here run from 1925 to 2007, and the register entries with a readable year from 1942 to 2012; both fall most thickly between the 1940s and the 1970s, the generation that arrived as immigrants and died in Cuba. Neither source is complete. Some memorials give only a year of birth and a year of death, in which case the age is a range and is shown as one. The register was old and damaged when it was transcribed: many entries give only the year of death, some give none, and some names could only be partly read. What the source states is what the record shows.
About the records
The records come from two sources, and each record says which one it is from.
The memorial records were transcribed 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.
The register entries come from the cemetery's own burial register, an old book that was already damaged when it was read. Miriam Kairey, a volunteer, transcribed it for JewishGen's Online Worldwide Burial Registry, a database of Jewish burials compiled by volunteers from cemetery visits and burial records; Harley Felstein and Sarina Roffe of the Sephardic Heritage Project helped make the work possible. Her marks of difficulty are kept as she wrote them: letters in brackets, question marks, alternative spellings, and words such as "niña" (girl) or "feto de" (fetus of) where the register gives no first name. Most entries give the year of death only. Where the register writes the month as a number, the date is shown as written and only the year is used for searching. The register places the cemetery in Havana; that is where the cemetery is, not a statement of where the person died. Each register entry links to its page on JewishGen.
Twenty-one register entries describe burials that already had a memorial here. On 19 October 2026 they were added to those memorial records as a second source: facts the memorial lacked, such as a grave location, are shown with credit to JewishGen, and where the register reads differently, the memorial's reading is kept and the register's is noted as another reading. They are not listed again.
Sources
- Find a Grave, memorials for the Sefaradi Cemetery of Havana: 57 memorials with headstone photographs by their contributors.
- JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry, Sefaradi Cemetery of Havana: 800 entries transcribed by Miriam Kairey from the cemetery's burial register, no photographs listed; last updated 13 December 2013. 779 of these entries are listed here and 21 were added to existing memorial records as a second source.
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