The
often tiny Jewish cemeteries dotted around the east end are exotic vestiges of
a London’s lost Mitteleuropan past. Surrounded
by high plain brick walls and tucked away on odd scraps of land, the rows of
weathered headstones inscribed with Hebrew script are often completely hemmed
in by blocks of flats, warehouses, schools, factories and other utilitarian
buildings. Fear of vandalism ensures their doors and gates remain locked and
visiting discouraged by the need to make appointments with impossible to locate
officials from the synagogue. With no
burials and few visitors they quickly revert to nature; trees and shrubs grow
from windblown seeds, grass and weeds flourish and foxes, birds take up
residence in the hidden piece of countryside in the centre of the city. In a
celebrated and evocative passage in Austerlitz
W.G. Sebald describes perfectly the slightly otherworldly atmosphere of
these cemeteries when the eponymous hero offers the narrator the use of his
house and insists that he;
...should not
omit.. to ring the bell at the gateway in the brick wall adjoining his house
for behind the wall, although he had never been able to see it from any of his
windows, there was a plot where lime trees and lilacs grew and in which members
of the Ashkenazi community had been buried ever since the eighteenth century,
including Rabbi David Tevele Schiff and Rabbi Samuel Falk, the Baal Shem of
London. He had discovered the cemetery, from which, as he now suspected, the
moths used to fly into his house.…only a few days before he left London, when
the gate in the wall stood open for the first time in all the years he had
lived in Alderney Street. Inside, a very small, almost dwarf-like woman of
perhaps seventy years old – the cemetery caretaker, as it turned out – was
walking along the paths in her slippers. Beside her, almost as tall as she was,
walked a Belgian sheepdog now grey with age who answered to the name of Billie
and was very timid. In the bright spring light, shining through the newly
opened leaves of the lime trees, you might have thought, Austerlitz told me,
that you had entered a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with
the passing of time…..
Austerlitz
would have approved of Louis Berk’s five year project to document the changing
seasons in the Brady Street and Alderney Road burial grounds. The photographer
is also a secondary school teacher who has worked in Whitechapel, on Brady
Street, since 2004. He was unaware of the existence of the burial ground until
he was idly staring out of a second storey window at work one afternoon and realised
that he was looking into a cemetery. As the place was always locked he expected
never to get inside but then one day he heard contractors at work in the
cemetery he knocked on the door and asked if he could look around. The workman allowed him in and from that
moment he was smitten “It was as though I had entered a country forest in the
middle of Whitechapel, complete with a fox which loped down a path ahead of me.
Grabbing my camera I took snapshots of headstones with intricate carvings as I
wandered beneath the cool green canopy overhead.” He approached the cemetery
owners, the United Synagogue of Great Britain, and asked them to allow him
regular access to carry out a project to capture the graveyard over the course
of a year, photographing it in every season.
His first winter on the project failed to provide weather cold enough to
produce snowfall. He had to wait almost three years in fact for a suitably
photogenic dusting of ice and snow. He was eventually asked by the Synagogue to
photograph their older burial plot in Alderney Road.
Berk’s
photographs are mainly taken on film using a medium format camera. In the spring
and summer shots the graves are enclosed in a world of green; grass and flowers
carpet the ground and a canopy of leaves occludes sun and sky. In one of my favourite images across almost
half the photo sycamore leaves hang like a diagonal swag of heavy curtain
parting to allow a view of a row of chest tombs in the foreground and trees in
the distance, evoking a closed, secret world. The trees keep the outside world
at bay, the buildings that surround the cemetery are effectively invisible and
although photographs are silent, the silence feels like part of the image, the
trees are muffling the noise of trains and traffic in the surrounding
streets. In other pictures the trees
stand like sentinels, huddling over the fragile headstones, protecting them
from the elements. In the winter shots the denuded trees open up the
photographic space and the cemetery becomes resolutely urban. In the
backgrounds of the pictures we can blocks of council flats or the concrete towers
of the Crossrail station being built a few hundred yards away. If the urban
invades, so does the sky, the hemmed in space finally opening up to the sun.
There is a beautiful shot of the sun rising into a sky that is a network of
skeletal trees, flaring above a collection of grey headstones that look as
monumental as Stonehenge from the low angle the shot is taken from. The natural
world is everywhere in these images; trees, flowers, berries, a thrush perched
on a headstone, fox tracks in the snow. But
they are also a matchless documentary record of the lost world of the Jewish
east end, the physical traces of which continue to be eroded and destroyed and
will eventually disappear altogether. If the anyone needed reminding of this one
the photographs shows two Hebrew inscribed headstones, the russet coloured
stone green with lichen with a block of late Victorian workers dwellings in the background. The stones are no
more; shortly after Berk photographed them a falling tree smashed both into
irreparable fragments.
East End Jewish Cemeteries by Louis Berk (with an introduction to the history of the cemeteries by Rachel Kolsky) is available from Amazon and directly from the author.
All photography copyright 2017 Louis Berk
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