Darty By The Grave

On Saturday, my class and I visited a Jewish Graveyard. While we visited this graveyard, we were in for a little surprise. There was a Darty right on the other side of the wall. A darty is a day time party and I have never heard of a Darty until I got here to College of Charleston.

However, while at this graveyard, I learned many things about how a Jewish graveyard differs from any other. It is known that Jews came in the late 1600s to the Americas. The United States is the first place in the world where Jews could own land and vote. People came from all over such as Spain and Portuguese. Here at this graveyard which is Coming Street Cemetery, K.K. Beth Elohim Est. 1762 there are about 800 people buried here but with only 500 stones. 10 Revolutionary War soilders and 21 Confederate soldiers are also buried here. People here are buried together, side by side but not on top of each other. When Jews died, they were buried pretty quickly.

There are many broken headstones here which I will post pictures below. They are currently working to restore the graves because many of them have collapsed. Also, one summer some kids spent their time restoring headstones after knocking over about 30 of them.

One interesting thing that stood out to me was the washing off your hands before leaving the cemetery. There was a fountain, and one thing I noticed was that only one other classmate and I washed our hands before leaving. Below, you will find many pictures of our Saturday's class visit. 

The pictures above are from what they believed to
be a spirit of Theodore Belitzer seen by someone
who was working in the grave one night restoring
the stones.

It is known that in Jews place rocks on graves to keep animals from walking over them so that the bodies can rest in peace. This all came about when hundreds of years ago, animals would dig up bodies and eat them.

These are a couple of pictures of some broken headstones