On May 25, Rachel Frankel and the Jamaican Jewish Cemeteries Preservation Fund introduced Jamaica’s Jewish cemeteries, provided virtual tours of the Falmouth Cemetery and the Orange Street Cemetery, and demonstrated their newly launched site specific online searchable database.
Presentation to Sephardic World
On December 12, 2021, the Jamaican Jewish Cemeteries Preservation Fund (JJCPF) launched their database of Jewish burial grounds. Since 2007, Rachel Frankel has led the cataloguing of the Jewish burial sites across the island. Rachel and Joseph de Leon, President of JJCPF, will discuss this important project, which helps fill a gap in our knowledge, as well as the need to preserve these historic Jewish sites.
West 11th Street Cemetery
By 1830, the City would open and extend Eleventh Street and convey the entire cemetery. At the midnight hour, the Congregation succeeded in getting the City to re-convey the portion of the cemetery that fell outside of the expansion of the new street. The result would leave a fragmentary triangle of burial ground and those graves that laid outside of it were transposed into it.
$15.5 Million a Record for Brooklyn Real Estate
An enormous brick townhouse in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, suitable as both home and studio with its voluminous rooms, soaring ceilings and built-in four-car garage, sold to the photographer Jay Maisel for $15.5 million, according to city records, breaking the record for the highest price ever paid for a single residence in the borough.
Harding Park
The challenge of this project was to create a commodious welcoming safe and legal single family residence for a sight impaired retired US Army Specialist and his spouse. The existing structure included an original bungalow with one hundred years of non-conforming improvements plus a recently built non-complying two-story rear yard addition.
Remnant Stones
Remnant Stones: Epitaphs presents transcriptions and English translations of nearly 1,700 epitaphs from Jewish cemeteries, carved in Portugese, Hebrew, Spanish, Dutch, Aramaic, and French. A fold-out scaled plan of each of the cemeteries shows stone orientation, locations, and adjacencies. A companion volume, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Essays, traces the history of Surinamese Jewry and presents a social, cultural, and architectural analysis of Suriname’s fascinating Jewish community.
High-Mileage Alterations
A small percentage of projects that include significant changes like a rooftop or rear addition require a hearing before the commission and the community board. A staff-level approval for a smaller project might add a few weeks and a thousand dollars or so to a budget, but a full commission hearing can add several months and many thousands, said Rachel Frankel, the principal of Rachel Frankel Architecture, a veteran of projects in historic districts.
The Jews in the Caribbean
This essay focuses on three seventeenth-century cemeteries. Two are remotely located in the interior rainforest of Suriname, South America. The third is at Hunt’s Bay, Jamaica. This Caribbean cemetery is now adjacent to a lawless squatter town on the industrial outskirts of Kingston. Burial in all three cemeteries ceased approximately 200 years ago. Subsequently, jungle flora obscured the sites, and only partial—but admirable and important—attempts were undertaken in the twentieth century to clear, restore, and inventorize them. Until I and my architectural teams began our investigations in Suriname in 1998 and in Jamaica in 2007, no definitive map of the cemeteries or complete inventory of the extant gravestones existed.
University of Chicago Divinity School
Houses of Life: The Jewish Cemeteries of Jamaica
— Rachel Frankel
At the outskirts of Port Royal lies Hunt’s Bay Jewish Cemetery, Jamaica’s oldest burial ground no longer in use today. The cemetery has recently been inventoried and mapped, and is now a Jamaica National Heritage Trust Site. Inventory work continues this month on the Orange Street Jewish Cemetery, Jamaica’s two hundred year old bet haim (“house of life”).