About JJCPF 

In 2007, at the invitation and under the auspices of the United Congregation of Israelites, Rachel Frankel recruited participants to document and catalog Jamaica’s Jewish cemeteries. At least fourteen burial grounds remain intact while close to twenty more are known but without extant grave markers. While some of the cemeteries are vast sites owned by the United Congregation of Israelites of Jamaica, others are little known on private property. Caribbean Volunteer Expeditions provided the organizational structure for recruiting and registering overseas, mostly American, volunteers. Individuals from Kingston’s United Congregation of Israelites and other Jamaican institutions also volunteered. For each cemetery we created the following documentation: a scaled site survey map enumerating each grave marker, digital and 35mm black and white film photography of each grave marker, a transcription and English translation of each epitaph, and a description of the architecture and condition of each grave marker. Our work is based on the magnum opus of Philip Wright, who in 1961, with his anonymous photographer visited every Jewish cemetery in Jamaica that he could find. Philip transcribed the Portuguese, Spanish, and English epitaphs. The Hebrew, he left to the photographer to capture which Charles Barnett, in England, then transcribed. Philip coupled his field work with research at the Institute of Jamaica and used Jacob Andrade’s _Record of the Jews in Jamaica_ published in 1940, (A Record of the Jews in Jamaica from the English Conquest to the Present Times | DLOC Collections). Philip Wright and Charles Barnett’s work was published after their deaths in 1997 by the Ben Zvi Institute. The work is titled _Jews of Jamaica: Tombstones Inscriptions 1663-1880 (Jews of Jamaica | DLOC Collections0).

Once the documentation was well underway, it was time to bring it to public awareness by way of a cemetery site, map based, online digital platform which would link gravestones to their respective photos, photos with epitaphic names, dates to conservation condition surveys, and all information back to the cemetery site. Around this time, some of the volunteers who participated in the documentation work year after year and some who have ancestors buried in the cemeteries, advocated for fund raising towards preservation and maintenance and so in 2017 the nonprofit JJCPF, Jamaican Jewish Cemeteries Preservation Fund, came into being. In addition to fund raising and planning for preservation and maintenance, JJCPF aims to increase awareness of the cemeteries' historical significance. The seven-member Board of JJCPF includes native born Jamaicans, Jamaican Jewish descendants, scholars, and professionals in architectural conservation and heritage tourism. JJCPF works collaboratively with UCI (some of whose board members are ours) towards conserving and bringing to public awareness the cemeteries and their legacy.