West Ham Jewish Cemetery facts for kids

West Ham Jewish Cemetery is a cemetery for Jews in West Ham in the London Borough of Newham, England. It was established in 1856 by the New Synagogue on Great St. Helen's, soon joined by the Great Synagogue in Duke's Place, both of them London congregations.

There are a number of notable people buried here, in a graveyard visually dominated by the imposing Rothschild Mausoleum. One section contains graves removed to this burial place from the former Hoxton burial ground of the Hambro Synagogue when that site underwent urban redevelopment. The oldest legible tombstone in this section dates from 1794.

Rothschild Mausoleum

The Rothschild Mausoleum is circular, domed, mausoleum built in 1866 by Ferdinand James von Rothschild for his late wife Evelina de Rothschild who died in childbed at age 27. The architect was Matthew Digby Wyatt. It is fashioned of marble in Renaissance revival style. Nikolaus Pevsner notes the "dome of Eighteenth-century detail on attached Corinthian columns" and praises the ironwork and stone carving, calling it worthy of "the attention of the student of mid-Victorian detail."

Anti-Semitic attack

In 2005 a number of monuments were destroyed and graves desecrated in what the police described as an attack by anti-Semitic vandals. The doors of the mausoleum were pounded with heavy iron bars until they were bashed in, then they were torn from the building.

Notable burials

• Evelina de Rothschild (1839–1866), socialite
• Ferdinand James von Rothschild (1839–1898)
• David Salomons
• Philip Salomons
• Matthew Digby Wyatt

War graves

The cemetery has five Commonwealth service war graves, four from World War I and one from World War II. A German soldier (prisoner of war) and two German civilian internees from the former war are also buried here.