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Protected status for city's Jewish cemetery site

Jack Hadaway-Weller
BBC News, Yorkshire•@jhweller
Historic England A red brick building with a plaque on the side in both English and Hebrew script. Surrounding the building is a brick wall with black railings on top. The building is next to a road.Historic England
The medieval cemetery site in York was discovered in the early 1980s during development work

The site of a rare medieval Jewish cemetery which is to be found underneath a car park has been granted protected status.

The cemetery in York, known as Jewbury, has been designated a Scheduled Monument, meaning any future development plans for the area would need to consider the archaeological significance of the site.

Jewbury lies just outside York's city walls at the site of the Foss Bank car park and was thought to be one of England's first and largest medieval Jewish cemeteries.

Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said: "Medieval Jewish cemeteries are very rare, with only 10 having been positively identified in England, and none are as extensively understood as this one."

In the early 1980s, the remains of almost 500 individuals were excavated and removed from the site for study, while about 50% of its graves remained undisturbed.

In 1984, the remains were reinterred in a plot on the south side of the site, in the presence of the then Chief Rabbi, Lord Jakobovitz.

Jack Hadaway-Weller/BBC A stone plaque on the wall of a car park in both Hebrew and English.Jack Hadaway-Weller/BBC
The location of the cemetery is marked by a plaque commemorating the medieval Jewish community of York

Rabbi Dovid Lichtig, from the Interlink Foundation, said: "The location was unknown, the car park was presumably placed when there were no markings."

According to Historic England, the cemetery "provides critical insight into York's medieval Jewish population".

That was "particularly significant given the 1190 massacre at Clifford's Tower, and the expulsion of all Jews from England a century later, in 1290", a spokesperson said.

The site of Jewbury was also important to British Jews, who objected to the cemetery being disturbed in the early 1980s when the land was being developed.

Rabbi Lichtig said: "People do visit the cemetery. I don't think it's a go-to location, simply because it hasn't been preserved as such.

"I think work will have to go into changing that."

The Historic England spokesperson said the importance of the site had been carefully considered in determining the scheduling boundaries.

The application for scheduling Jewbury was prompted by planning discussions for a mixed-use redevelopment scheme at the site.

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