Burials in the Jewish Cemetery of Shumen, Bulgaria

Compiled by Joseph Covo, Israel

The following list of the Jews buried in the new cemetery of Shumen, Bulgaria has been originally prepared in Bulgarian , handwritten by Marko Abraham Farin (1893-1963) , but few names have been added after the date of his decease.

I have translated this list in English and Mathilde Tagger has transliterated the names and rearranged the original chronological list into an alphabetical one. The numbers in the left side of the list reflect the number of each grave according to the chronological order of the death and the burial. The Shumen cemetery contains 653 graves of the Jews who died between the years 1873 and 1966 (there was an older cemetery which does not exist anymore), but the list is shorter as 28 of the names of the graves were unreadable.

Shumen, or Shumla as this old Bulgarian town was called during the 500 years of Ottoman rule, lies in north-eastern Bulgaria south of the Danube river and not far from the Black Sea. It had an important Alliance Israelite Universelle school and the local Jewish community played an important role in the Bulgarian Sionist Movement. After WW II almost its entire Jewish population immigrated to Israel. Today only very few Jews live in Shumen, most of them members of mixed marriages. The Jewish cemetery is the only testimony of this once vibrant and active Jewish community.