Cemeteries in Israel

National cemetery totals vary according to date, definition, and scope. The State Comptroller's 2020 summary reported 940 active cemeteries, 577 licensed burial entities, and approximately 12,400 dunams of land in use for burial, with roughly 44,000 deaths per year.[1] About 64 percent of those receiving Jewish or civil burial were interred in the 30 largest cemeteries.[1] A Knesset Research and Information Center abstract published on November 27, 2025, placed the total at approximately 1,090 cemeteries served by 455 burial-service entities. That count covered all faiths without separate totals for Jewish, civil, Muslim, Christian, Druze, or other categories.[2]

A 2019 joint project by MyHeritage and BillionGraves documented more than 1.5 million tombstones across 638 cemeteries and placed the data in a searchable database with GPS coordinates. It was described as an effort to document all cemeteries in Israel.[5] The JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry separately catalogued 713 Israeli cemeteries, with 1,602,451 burial records and 1,472,509 photographs, although the registry did not assert that its inventory was complete.[6] JewishGen's International Jewish Cemetery Project identifies its GPS directory as a selection of Jewish cemeteries, excludes very small sites including some on kibbutzim, and notes that military and Commonwealth graves do not always fall within neatly separated cemetery categories.[7]

Ancient Jewish cemeteries and tomb complexes are documented across Israel. Second Temple–period sites dating from the first century BCE through the first century CE have been studied at Jerusalem, Jericho, Ein Gedi, Qumran, and other locations, with scholarship examining burial architecture, ossuaries, inscriptions, grave goods, and funerary practices.[8] Jericho's Jewish cemetery of the Second Temple period was the subject of a 1999 publication by Rachel Hachlili, Ann E. Killebrew, and other contributors, issued by the Israel Antiquities Authority.[8]

Beit She'arim in northern Israel is a large system of Jewish burial caves carved from soft limestone and dating to the second century CE.[9] The ancient Jewish cemetery of Safed contains more than 100 previously undocumented Hebrew epitaphs dating from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. The cited study characterizes them as the largest corpus of ancient Hebrew inscriptions found at one site in Israel and says they provide evidence of a diverse Jewish community that included certified physicians and an otherwise unrecorded yeshiva.[10]

An archival register for the Safed cemetery lists 1,976 burials numbered 1,497 through 3,472. Its entries are alphabetically arranged by first name and record family names and places of birth; the archival description dates the materials to 1583, 1585, 1600, 1748, and 1795–2000.[11] Ramat Hanadiv in Zikhron Ya'akov, within the formal Baron de Rothschild gardens, contains the crypt in which Edmond de Rothschild and his wife were reinterred.[12] Kibbutz Gezer's cemetery, near Modiin, Ramle, and Rehovot, contains early graves dating from 1948.[13]

Israeli law provides a right to burial in a civil ceremony and requires civil cemeteries to be established in different areas so that people seeking civil burial can reasonably access one.[14] Figures reported for 2016 included 21 Jewish cemeteries with civil-burial plots, 21 dedicated cemeteries for people defined by the government as lacking religion, and 13 additional cemeteries in ten agricultural localities authorized to conduct civil burial for local and nearby residents.[14]

A 2017 government report, describing conditions as of March 2016, listed 19 cemeteries for alternative civilian burial contracted with the National Insurance Institution. They included facilities in Eilat, Ariel, Be'er-Sheva, Haifa, Tiberias, Netanya, Modi'in, Nahariya, and Acre.[15] It also listed 24 cemeteries authorized to conduct civil burial for persons with no religion.[15]

Land shortages have led national policy to favor saturated, multilayered burial over field burial.[1] The 2025 Knesset abstract recorded 49,812 burials in 2024 and estimated that they used between 105.8 and 125 net dunams, depending on burial methods and density.[2]

Israeli cemeteries function as places of burial, national remembrance, pilgrimage, and historical documentation. Mount Herzl's Memorial Day ceremonies connect the graves of fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism with national commemoration.[16] Kinneret Cemetery, where Zionist pioneers and Labor movement leaders were buried from 1911 onward, draws visitors paying tribute to figures associated with the development of Jewish settlement in the region.[17]

The legal framework accommodates religious Jewish burial and alternative civil burial, while Muslim, Christian, Druze, and other communities bury their dead according to their own customs.[14][15] The Alternative Burial Law enacted in 1995 guaranteed the establishment of alternative cemeteries across Israel following legal proceedings connected with the Menucha Nechona burial society.[18]

Cemetery documentation has also become a significant genealogical and historical undertaking. The MyHeritage–BillionGraves project linked more than 1.5 million tombstone photographs to GPS coordinates, while JewishGen's registry catalogued more than 1.6 million Israeli burial records.[6][5] Research at Safed's ancient Jewish cemetery illustrates how documentation of burial sites continues to produce evidence about historic Jewish communities.[10]

The Mount of Olives cemetery, also known as Har HaZeitim, stands in eastern Jerusalem, east of the Temple Mount, and is among the world's oldest and most significant Jewish burial sites.[19][3] One source describes it as extending over approximately 250 dunams and containing twelve separate burial locations: four major areas and eight smaller areas generally associated with Oriental Jewish communities.[19] An estimated 150,000 graves are recorded there, with Jewish burial traditions extending back to biblical times.[3][3] Figures identified as buried on the Mount include the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, Henrietta Szold, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Abraham Isaac Kook, Menachem Begin, S. Y. Agnon, Haim Hazaz, and numerous rabbis and community leaders.[19][3]

The cemetery's burial areas developed over centuries. The ancient Sephardic section served Jews from all Jerusalem communities from the fourteenth century until 1856, after which it became associated primarily with Jews from Oriental communities. The Perushim-founded General Burial Society cemetery began receiving burials in 1856 and operated until the War of Independence. Burials there, including those of Menachem Begin and his wife Aliza, resumed after the Six-Day War. A separate Hassidic cemetery also opened in 1856 and served Jerusalem's Hassidic courts until the War of Independence.[20]

Two Second Temple–period tombs, popularly identified as Absalom's Pillar and the Tomb of Jehoshaphat, stand in the Kidron Valley at the foot of the cemetery.[21] During the 1948 hostilities, burial on the Mount became too dangerous and temporary cemeteries were used in western Jerusalem. Jewish burial at the site resumed after the area came under Israeli control in 1967.[19]

Sources report extensive damage during Jordanian rule over eastern Jerusalem. One states that approximately 38,000 smashed or damaged tombstones and graves were counted and describes subsequent work to restore graves, construct paths and access routes, improve security, and renew burial.[20] A separate JNS report states that more than 35,000 graves were destroyed between 1949 and 1967.[22] The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs describes the site as a "religious and national pantheon for the Jewish people and the State of Israel."[19]

Mount Herzl, known in Hebrew as Har HaZikaron, the Mount of Memory, is located in western Jerusalem beside the Jerusalem Forest and Yad Vashem.[23][4] Theodor Herzl's remains were transferred from Vienna and reinterred on the hill in 1949. Military burials began on its northern slope in November of that year, and a 1951 government decision established a national cemetery for Israeli leaders and fallen soldiers.[4]

Herzl died in Austria on July 3, 1904, and was reinterred on Mount Herzl on August 17, 1949.[23][4] His children Hans and Pauline were reburied beside him in 2006, and his grandson Stephen Theodore Norman was reinterred there in 2007.[23][4] The national cemetery includes the graves of Nahum Goldmann and former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, as well as Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. Leah Rabin is buried alongside her husband.[24][4]

The National Military and Police Cemetery occupies Mount Herzl's northern slope. It holds the graves of fallen Israel Defense Forces personnel and police officers, together with memorials and common graves associated with military campaigns, missing soldiers, Jewish soldiers who served in foreign armies during World War II, and other wartime losses.[4] A mass grave contains the remains of defenders of Gush Etzion, including Nathaniel Petrushka.[25]

The military cemetery hosts Israel's main national ceremony on Memorial Day for fallen soldiers, beginning with a two-minute siren. A separate state memorial service for victims of terrorism is held on Mount Herzl later the same day.[16]

Har HaMenuchot, in Jerusalem's Givat Shaul neighborhood, is identified as the city's main cemetery and its largest Jewish cemetery, with more than 150,000 graves.[26][9] A National Library record dates its founding to 1949 and describes its first two decades as marked by disagreement and neglect, while a JewishGen registry says it opened in 1951.[27][28]

The cemetery includes a municipal section known as the Jerusalem Pantheon, intended for people honored by the Jerusalem Municipality, including former municipal officials and ministers who lived in Jerusalem.[28] To address urban burial-space shortages, plans for Har HaMenuchot included a subterranean, three-floor complex of twelve tunnels designed to accommodate 22,000 additional burials and drawing on ancient precedents of cave burial.[9]

Trumpeldor Cemetery, also called the Old Cemetery of Tel Aviv, is the city's first cemetery. It was established during a cholera outbreak before Tel Aviv's formal founding and was named Trumpeldor Cemetery in 1920.[29][13] Covering approximately 11 dunams, it is an urban cemetery containing the graves of early residents and founders of the city, including Meir Dizengoff, Chaim Arlosoroff, and Ahad Ha-Am.[12][13] The national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik was buried there after his death in 1934. His body first lay in state at Tel Aviv city hall, where thousands of mourners passed the bier.[29] Singer Arik Einstein is also buried at Trumpeldor.[12] A 480-page Hebrew monograph on the cemetery by Yaakov Markel was published in Tel Aviv in 2018.[30]

Other major cemeteries in the district include Hayarkon Cemetery, which features sprawling terraced structures outside Tel Aviv; Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery in Givataim; Kiryat Shaul Cemetery, which opened in 1949; and the Jaffa cemetery area.[31][9] Holon Cemetery opened in the 1960s, while Hayarkon Cemetery opened in 1991.[31] Ganei Esther, also known as Rishon Lezion Old Cemetery, is identified as Rishon Lezion's oldest cemetery.[13] The Tel Aviv district burial society's website covers six Jewish cemeteries but excludes two private cemeteries on Hazon Ish Street in Bnei Brak.[31]

Kinneret Cemetery is a historic burial ground on Route 90 in northern Israel, overlooking the Sea of Galilee in a palm-tree-shaded landscape near Kibbutz Kinneret.[12][13] The first grave was dug there in 1911, and the site became the resting place of Zionist pioneers and Labor movement figures including Berl Katznelson, Nachman Syrkin, Rachel Bluwstein, Ber Borochov, Moses Hess, Avraham Herzfeld, and Shmuel Stoller.[17] The cemetery serves the communities of Kvutzat Kinneret and Moshava Kinneret.[13]

Beyond Mount Herzl, Israel maintains military cemeteries in numerous cities. Sites identified in a Jerusalem Post report include Kiryat Shaul military cemetery in Tel Aviv and military cemeteries in Haifa, Beersheba, Holon, Netanya, Rishon Lezion, Kiryat Anavim, Nahariya, and Petah Tikva.[32] The Jewish Agency also names military cemeteries in Ashkelon and Kibbutz Lahav.[25] JewishGen notes that many military graves are located in non-military cemeteries rather than designated military burial grounds.[7]

Beersheba War Cemetery, also called the CWGC British World War I Military Cemetery, contains 1,241 Commonwealth burials from the First World War, including 67 unidentified burials. It is located near Beersheba's old town, Beit Yatziv, and the former Turkish railway station.[18] The soldiers buried there include British, Australian, and New Zealand personnel who fought Ottoman forces.[18]

Israel also maintains two designated Cemeteries for Enemy Casualties, sometimes called numbered cemeteries, for the bodies of enemy soldiers and terrorists killed in conflict. The sites are fenced and marked; bodies are placed in numbered caskets after identification, no ceremony is conducted, and burial is described as temporary because remains may later be returned to their countries of origin.[33] Commonwealth graves in some Jewish cemeteries and Jewish graves in a small number of Commonwealth cemeteries further complicate categorical distinctions.[7]

Beersheba is described as having four Jewish cemeteries: a very-old cemetery, an old cemetery, a new cemetery, and Menucha Nechona.[18] The very-old cemetery was established in January 1917 after 16 Jewish workers died in a British air raid, when Nisim Elqayam purchased land outside the town for their burial.[18]

Menucha Nechona was founded in 1986 to provide liberal Jewish or secular burial. Following legal proceedings, the Knesset enacted the Alternative Burial Law in 1995, guaranteeing the establishment of alternative cemeteries across Israel.[18]

Israel has numerous Christian and Muslim cemeteries serving local communities.[9] Haifa's cemetery landscape includes Jewish military, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Anglican, Muslim, Commonwealth, and other burial grounds in close proximity.[7] Bab al-Rahmeh is a Muslim cemetery adjacent to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem, while Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox cemeteries are located on Mount Zion near Jerusalem's Old City.[21]

JewishGen's GPS directory covers only selected Jewish cemeteries and explicitly excludes some kibbutz sites and very small cemeteries.[7] It therefore cannot serve as a complete inventory of Muslim, Christian, Druze, and other burial grounds. The Knesset Research and Information Center's 2025 figure of approximately 1,090 cemeteries covers people of all faiths, but does not give separate totals by religion or burial category.[2]

Several cemeteries are connected with political or historical disputes. The Mount of Olives cemetery lies in eastern Jerusalem, whose sovereignty has been contested in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Sources give differing estimates for the number of graves destroyed or damaged during Jordanian rule, including more than 35,000 and approximately 38,000.[20][22] These are source-specific estimates and should not be treated as a single settled count.

Bab al-Rahmeh became a flashpoint when Israel's Nature and Parks Authority demolished 12 gravestones in two actions. Israeli officials said the graves stood in an expanded area considered part of a national park, while Palestinian officials and Muslim religious leaders said that the graves were within the cemetery's documented historical boundaries.[21]

The Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox cemeteries on Mount Zion were among Christian religious properties reported as affected by vandalism and anti-Christian graffiti.[21] The same State Department report documented vandalism and arson incidents affecting the Mount of Olives Jewish cemetery.[21]

Published national totals also diverge substantially. A 2019 digitization project documented 638 cemeteries, the State Comptroller's 2020 summary reported 940 active cemeteries, and the Knesset's 2025 research abstract estimated approximately 1,090.[1][2][5] The figures concern different dates, definitions, and scopes, including differences over whether small, non-Jewish, or incompletely documented sites are included; none of the three should be treated as a timeless, definitive total.