page_title: Mount Zion Cemetery, Jerusalem
section_title: During the World Wars and the British mandate
hierarchical_section_title: Mount Zion Cemetery, Jerusalem / History / During the World Wars and the British mandate
caption_attribution_description: Jerusalem English: BRITISH AMBULANCES STANDING ON KING DAVID STREET (BOTTOM) WITH THE MONTEFIORE QUARTER AND MOUNT ZION ACROSS THE NO MANS LAND IN THE BACKGROUND IN JERUSALEM. עברית: אמבולנסים בריטיים חונים ברחוב המלך דוד, ברקע שכונת "ימין משה" והר ציון.
context_page_description: The Protestant Mount Zion Cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Israel is a cemetery owned by the Anglican Church Missionary Trust Association Ltd., London, represented by the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and The Middle East. In 1848 Samuel Gobat, Bishop of Jerusalem, opened the cemetery and dedicated it as ecumenical graveyard for congregants of Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed and old Catholic faith. Since its original beneficiary, the Bishopric of Jerusalem was maintained as a joint venture of the Anglican Church of England and the Evangelical Church in Prussia, a united Protestant Landeskirche of Lutheran and Reformed congregations, until 1886, the Jerusalem Lutheran congregation preserved a right to bury congregants there also after the Jerusalem Bishopric had become a solely Anglican diocese.
context_section_description: Between 1914 and 1917, during World War I, the Sublime Porte expelled Britons as enemy aliens from the Ottoman Empire, thus leaving the joint administration of Mount Zion Cemetery to the Evangelical Protestants of German nationality. Until January 1917 the German Imperial Army laid out a section of the cemetery as a non-denominational war cemetery for Austro-Hungarian (5), British (2) and German soldiers (11) of all religious denominations killed in action in the battles close to Jerusalem since 1916 and retrieved by the German medical corps. After the British capture of Jerusalem on 9 December 1917 the British army also buried its soldiers on Mount Zion Cemetery, before the separate Jerusalem War Cemetery was inaugurated on Mount Scopus in February 1918. A total of 104 British soldiers were buried here, of which 100 were later reburied at the War Cemetery, although four who died between the Armistice of November 1918 and the end of Commonwealth War Graves Commission registration in August 1921 remained maintained there.
  On 26 July 1921 Bishop Rennie MacInnes had convened the burial board and only two Evangelical representatives could take part, due to their flight or the expulsion of many German citizens from the Holy Land by the British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA). Gustaf Dalman, director of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology and representing the expelled Provost Friedrich Jeremias (1868–1945), presented the annual financial statements for the years of 1914 to 1917, when Britons could not participate in the joint board. The CMS was partially still in arrears with its half of the purchase price and the burial board had debts with Deutsche Palästina-Bank, which was in the process of liquidation after the expropriation of German property abroad for war reparations to the World War I allies (except the Russian Empire's successor the Soviet Union).
  Dalman's successor Provost Albrecht Alt participated in the board's continued settlement of the cemetery debts. In order to settle them Jerusalem's Evangelical congregation of German language stepped in, which netted its holdings of similar amount with the afore-mentioned bank with the cemetery's debts, thus defraying its share in the debt amortisation. The prior military conflict and the German defeat did not impair the joint administration of the cemetery. To the opposite, as Alt's successor Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg described, the Anglican clergy and missionaries socialised with their Evangelical counterparts in an overly friendly way. In 1924 all the German seats in the burial board were staffed again. In the annual report season 1925/26 Provost Hertzberg initiated that the burial board bought a hearse.
  Due to the altered political situation in Palestine with the League of Nations mandate for Britain the two parties revised the cemetery statute in 1929, replacing the British consul by the Deputy Jerusalem District Commissioner, further increasing the burial fees and introducing limited tenures on grave sites, in order to forestall a run out of space for new burials in the future. In 1932 Provost Ernst Rhein (1885–1969) estimated that with the then number of annual burials the cemetery would reach its maximal capacity in 1939. So the burial board started planning for a new cemetery.
  The mandate government addressed the burial board with the request, to allow them also burying members of government authorities and armed forces, who had not been Anglicans or Evangelical Protestants. The growing number of British casualties killed in service for the mandate government by anti-British terrorists became a rising problem for the government. The congregation of Presbyterian Church of Scotland indicated its interest to join the cemeterial community.
  In 1933 Weston Henry Stewart, Archdeacon for Palestine, Syria and Trans-Jordan between 1926 and 1943, suggested to acquire land together with the mandate government for a new municipal cemetery on Mount Scopus next to the British Jerusalem War Cemetery, allowing each different congregation to use a specific sect
caption: Montefiore Windmill against the background of Mount Zion with Bishop Gobat School and Cemetery with its extension of 1904 (indicated by the bright protruding wall, upper centre right; photo of 1 May 1948)
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