L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue - Cemetery
The Cemeteries
Attested since the thirteenth century, the Jewish community of L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, was like the other communities of Comtat Venaissin locked from the fifteenth century in a ghetto, a "quarry", in the heart of the city, around the current Jewish square. With Avignon, Carpentras and Cavaillon, it became from the seventeenth century one of the only four authorized in the pope’s states. The Jews of L'Isle evidently owned a synagogue, destroyed in 1856, and high houses, crowded and unsanitary, some elements of which remain.
They also had a cemetery from the Middle Ages, which seems to have always been at the present location, isolated in the countryside two kilometers southwest of the village. The area was doubled in 1736 by the acquisition of a neighbouring land. The complex has an area of 94 acres, but only a small part is occupied by emerging burials, which range from the 19th century to 1939, the date of the last burial. Since then the cemetery is abandoned.
The tombs, about forty in total, are distributed in the enclosures of the four families that survived in the 19th century, the Abram, the Carcassonne, the Crémieux, the Créange. The family areas are carefully closed by fences consisting of a bahut wall surmounted by a wrought iron grille. The tombs associate for the most part a flat slab with a vertical element, stele or cippe. Apart from the absence of crosses and statues, characteristic of contemporary Catholic cemeteries, they have few references to Jewish identity: few elements of decoration and rare Hebrew inscriptions.
Protection: Ancient Jewish cemetery, complete with its portal, tombs, monuments and other elements, soil and basement (cad. BP 97), entry by order of 30 June 2008