Brady Street Jewish Cemetery (London)

Brady Street runs between Whitechapel and Bethnal Green stations. From Whitechape, turn left before the station and follow Whitechapel Road out of town a few steps to the first side street on the left, this is Brady Street. You pass a school on the left side of the street and on this side you see a high perimeter wall topped by trees, behind which is the cemetery.

Coming from Bethnal Green, turn left and follow Three Colts Lane statdteinwärts. After a few steps Brady Street branches off to the left.

The lattice gate is locked, you can only see a very small part of the cemetery from there, for visits to the cemetery you must contact The United Synagogue (020 8950 7767).

The cemetery covers about 16 000 m2. Over 550 gravestones are visible there today, but the number of those buried there is likely to be larger: similar to the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, due to lack of space, the area of old graves was covered with a layer of earth in which new graves could be created. As a result, the older and the newer gravestones stand partly back to back.

The cemetery was established in 1761 and used until 1858, the most prominent among those buried there being Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836), the founder of the English branch of the Rothschild family. It is thanks to his great-grandson Nathaniel Mayer Victor 3rd Baron Rothschild (1910-1990) that the existence of the cemetery is not threatened until 2090:

A municipal ordinance passed in the 1980s allowed the relevant authorities to claim burial plots that had not been used as such for 100 years, clear the graves and bones, and use the area for other purposes. To avoid or delay this, Baron Rothschild was buried in 1990 next to his ancestor's grave in the cemetery, which had already been closed since 1858.