Naama Barak
August 8, 2019

It’s not uncommon to find Israel starring in “Top 10” lists. You know, like “Top 10 places with amazing food” or “Top 10 incredible high-tech hubs.” But recently it featured in a list that really is just to die for.

A blog post on the BillionGraves website put together a list of the top 10 cemeteries that any graveyard aficionados must visit before they die. And guess what: Israel did not go unnoticed.

Coming in at a rather modest No. 10, the Har Hamenuchot Cemetery in Jerusalem was described in some detail by the blogger, who explained what traditional Jewish cemeteries look like and was particularly taken with the custom of laying stones on top of graves.

“It is traditional for Jewish visitors to place a rock on the grave of a loved one each time they visit the gravesite. While some stones are placed in a pile, others are elaborately arranged to create pictures,” the post noted.

BillionGraves is a website and app that helps people locate the graves of ancestors. Users snap photographs of headstones and record their GPS location before uploading the information to the website, where they transcribe the information for others to search.

Other lucky cemeteries included on the list are the seaside Waverley Cemetery in New South Wales, Australia; the colorful Cimitirul Vesel in Sapanta, Romania; and the underwater Neptune Memorial Reef, situated off Key Biscayne, Florida.

Trumpeldor Cemetery in the heart of Tel Aviv might have made for a more interesting choice. Photo by Moshe Shai/FLASH90

Not to sound ungrateful, but while Har Hamenuchot Cemetery is definitely one of Israel’s largest and best-known gravesites, it’s not its most interesting one.

Should a follow-up list be composed, we suggest considering instead the Trumpeldor Cemetery in the heart of Tel Aviv, the final resting place of many of the country’s great poets and politicians, or the serene Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim Cemetery, where some of the fighters in Israel’s War of Independence are buried.