Another group of Jews, members of Zwi Migdal, also tried to join the Ashkenazi Chevra Kedisha. Zwi Migdal was an organization of Jewish pimps and prostitutes involved in human trafficking (dubbed “white slavery”). As such, its members were considered the t’meym (“the impure”). The Ashkenazim refused to allow the t’meym into their organization, informing them that “separation between purity and impurity was extended even to the dead.”⁴ To avoid any affiliation with Zwi Migdal, the Ashkenazim enforced strict membership rules and rejected donations from unknown sources to ensure that they did not benefit from t’meym money. Accordingly, the t’meym formed their own Chevra Kedisha, called the Sociedad Israelita de Socorros Mutuos Varsovia (“Jewish Mutual Aid Society of Warsaw”).

After years of negotiating permits and fundraising, the Sephardim and the t’meym both managed to purchase adjacent plots in Barracas del Sud in 1900 and 1909 respectively. However, in 1930, the Argentine government disbanded and imprisoned Zwi Migdal and its members, so the t’meym cemetery fell to the state. Today, both cemeteries remain in Avellaneda, but the well-maintained Sephardic burial grounds stand in contrast to the unkempt Zwi Migdal plots.

Buenos Aires has such a large Jewish population that most Jewish cemeteries are relegated to specific sects (i.e. Sephardic, Ashkenazi, etc.) and nationalities (i.e. Syrian, Morroccan, etc.).⁹  In fact, most cemeteries separated by sect and nationality do not communicate with each other and keep to themselves.

The largest cemetery in Buenos Aires, Cementerio Israelita de La Tablada, belongs to the Ashkenazim and was founded in 1936.¹⁰ It spans roughly 56 hectares (138 acres) and houses over 70,000 graves. La Tablada Cemetery has both cultural and religious significance for the Jewish community beyond just Argentina because it is the burial ground for the 1994 AMIA Bombing victims, whose graves are separated in a “Martyrs Section.”¹¹ One of the more notable graves belongs to Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor of the AMIA trials whose death was officially ruled a suicide until it was discovered to be murder.

In 1996, vandals damaged and defaced over 100 tombstones and several mausoleums with graffiti of swastikas and Hitler’s name, marking the third desecration of a Jewish Argentine cemetery that year. This resulted in a significant degree of unrest in the Jewish community, because the defacement revealed the sustained antisemitism in Argentina.

The Cemitério Israelita de Inhaúma was inaugurated much earlier, in 1906, by pimps and prostitutes (t’meym) who were rejected from other Jewish organizations.¹⁹ Although most of the 807 tombs it holds belong to women, the cemetery kept the prostitutes’ burials isolated from the rest of the graves. Moreover, the burial grounds were further divided to separate the men’s and children’s graves from the women’s, regardless of their social class. The Cemitério Israelita de Inhaúma had issues with overcrowding because Jewish law prohibits placing more than one body in a tomb, although the Jews running the cemetery bent this rule and buried 3 bodies per grave for a time. However, they eventually ceased active burials in the cemetery altogether in the 1970s.

The Cemitério Comunal Israelita de Nilópolis was founded in 1935 and is still actively used.²² Until the 1990s, it contained the only guenizá (tomb for damaged torah scrolls and other liturgical documents) in Brazil, so the country’s damaged holy objects were all buried here until the end of the 20th century. The guenizá measures 3 meters deep by 3 meters wide (almost 10 feet x 10 feet) and is still in use today.

The entrances of these cemeteries allude to the status of those who are buried in them. The entrance of the Cemitério Israelita de Inhaúma, which was primarily reserved for t’meym and their family, looks notably different than those of the Cemitério Comunal Israelita de Rio de Janeiro and the Cemitério Comunal Israelita de Nilópolis.

This video is in Portuguese, and centers around the 3 cemeteries operated by the Sociedade Cemitério Comunal Israelita de Rio de Janeiro.²⁶ It describes the accommodations that the facilitators and groundskeepers provide to visitors, and offers a more comprehensive view of what these Jewish Latin American cemeteries look like in Rio de Janeiro.

It was many years before the Chevra Kadisha of Rio de Janeiro was considered the official Chevra Kadisha, because past congregations and leaders could not agree on several divisive issues.²⁷ For example, they faced the decision of turning the t’meym away from their synagogue and cemetery — which they did, and the t’meym thus created the Cemitério Israelita de Inhaúma in Rio de Janeiro. Eventually, power in Brazil’s Jewish community consolidated and the Chevra Kadisha of Rio de Janeiro officially formed. It operates both the Vila Rosali Velho Cemetery (the old) and the Vila Rosali Novo Cemetery (the new) in São João de Meriti, as well as the Cemetery of Vilar dos Teles in Belford Roxo. 

The Chevra Kadisha acquired the Vila Rosali Velho Cemetery in 1920 and began burials as early as 1921. Although there are no active burials there today, it is still significant to Brazil’s Jewish community. It houses the oldest Holocaust Memorial in Latin America, and is reported to have an urn of soap that was made from prisoners’ body fat in the internment camps. The Chevra Kadisha no longer enforces separating men’s and women’s tombs in their cemeteries, but originally they did, so the Vila Rosali Velho Cemetery is the only of their trio that categorizes plots by gender. Once the cemetery got full, the Chevra Kadisha opened the Vila Rosali Novo Cemetery across the street from it. The Chevra Kadisha acquired the Vila Rosali Novo Cemetery in 1945, but did not open it for use until 1967. Jewish burials are still conducted on these grounds to this day.

The third cemetery that the Chevra Kadisha of Rio de Janeiro operates, the Cemetery of Vilar dos Teles, is just outside of São João de Meriti in Belford Roxo. The Chevra Kadisha bought it to further address the problem of the Vila Rosali Velho Cemetery becoming full. Founded in 1986, it currently houses 3,200 graves and is still adding more.

São Paulo has its own Chevra Kadisha, the Associação Cemitério Israelita de São Paulo.²⁸ It operates several Jewish cemeteries, the oldest being the Vila Mariana cemetery which was built in 1904 and allowed Jews to stop using municipal cemeteries to bury their dead.²⁹

Shortly thereafter, the Beneficent and Religious Association of Israel in Santos inaugurated the The Israeli Cemetery of Cubatão in 1929. The Chevra Kadisha didn’t buy the cemetery until 1996, though active burials in it stopped in 1966. In 2010, the Israeli Cemetery of Cubatão became the first Jewish cemetery in Brazil to become a historical heritage site. It is roughly 800 square meters (2,625 square feet) and holds 75 graves, 55 of which belong to women. This cemetery housed São Paulo’s t’meym population of prostitutes.

The most prominent of the Chevra Kadisha’s cemeteries in São Paulo is the Cemitério Israelita de Butantã. The Butantã cemetery has over 2,000 graves and requires men who visit it to wear a kippah (a small hat or head-covering for religious purposes).³⁰ It opened in 1953, but due to its distance from town, most Jews still preferred to use the Vila Mariana cemetery instead. However, they eventually adjusted to its location and the Butantã cemetery gained acclaim. In 1974, they erected a memorial to the victims of Nazism to recognize the millions of Jews that lost their lives in the Holocaust. To commemorate the monument’s completion, members of the Chevra Kadisha deposited the ashes of Holocaust victims that had been buried in the Vila Mariana cemetery since 1950 in a concentration camp in Poland.

The newest Jewish cemetery in São Paulo is the Embu Cemetery, which currently only occupies about 19 square meters (62 square feet).³³ The Open Museum, which works to identify Jewish remains and families buried in Gentile (non-Jewish) municipal cemeteries, was established on its grounds in 2006. Once people have been located, the museum transfers their remains to the Embu cemetery and performs the necessary religious rituals to bury their bodies on Jewish burial grounds.

The first recorded synagogue and cemetery in Suriname was created in Thorarica (now called Torarica) in August 1665, but was lost to the Suriname River.⁴³

Painting of original Kordonpad synagogue and cemetery⁴⁴

The cemetery in Cassipora (formerly called Cassiepoera) measures about 84 by 76 meters (275 by 250 feet). It has 216 gravestones dating from 1666 to 1873 and is the oldest known Jewish jungle cemetery. Its tombstones, 75% of which depict iconography, were made of both sedimentary stone (limestone, bluestone, and a mix) and white marble, neither of which are native to Suriname. It only contains 2 ohalim (prism-shaped grave markers), presumably reserved for the community’s rabbis. More recent mid-20th century cemeteries here feature many wooden stakes with heart-shaped akoma on them, likely due to the large African diaspora in Suriname.⁴⁵ However, its tombstones no longer portray illustrative imagery.

Jodensavanne (“Jewish Savanna”) had a large Jewish community with strong Messianic ties, and was compared on several tombstones to the Garden of Eden from the Bible.⁴⁷ It was home to Suriname’s second recorded synagogue and cemetery, a Sephardic cemetery near Cassipora Creek. The cemetery measures 8 by 50 meters (roughly 26 by 164 feet) and has 280 gravestones. The plots were arranged by families, with separate burial grounds for the de Costas, la Parras, and more. In 1832, a fire leveled the town and cemetery, neither of which were ever fully restored.

Another Sephardic cemetery was built around 1685, and has 462 graves that date as late as 1873. Only 43% of the gravestones in this cemetery feature iconography, because most of them were carved by North American sculptors, and North American burial customs focused on words, not ornamentation. However, the graves that were engraved were highly individualized. For example, a deceased person with the last name “de Meza” (which translates to “table” in Spanish and Portuguese) had symbols of shew bread engraved on his bier to play on the fact that it looks like a table.

The cemeteries were adjacent to one another and reveal the relationship between the 2 sects in Paramaribo. The tombs in the Ashkenazi cemetery being laid flat in Sephardic custom demonstrates how the tribes influenced each other’s burial practices. Moreover, the names and iconography on tombstones reveal intermarriage and cultural exchange. Statues appeared in both cemeteries in the late 19th century as both groups continued to integrate into Latin American culture.