A bureaucratic mess threatens to leave Catalonia’s Jews without graves. It has been three years since a request to build 68 new graves in the Hebrew precinct of the Collserola cemetery has been blocked by Cerdanyola del Vallès Town Council, in the municipality where the cemetery is located. The situation is urgent: today, after a recent emergency excavation, only eight tombs remain available. According to the current rate of deaths, they will be covered in six months.
Those in charge of the Consistory flatly deny the suspicions of anti-Semitism expressed by some sectors of the Jewish community and insist that the delay is due to purely administrative reasons due to the protection requirements of the location of the cemetery in the Collserola natural park .
In 1976, the Israeli Community of Barcelona (CIB) obtained the concession to establish its own site in the then new Northern Cemetery. There were only two Jews in the city, in Les Corts and Sant Andreu, which were on the verge of saturation and where, moreover, during the Franco era there had been friction due to the movement of remnants, an unacceptable fact for the Jewish religion.
The land of the CIB has a surface of 22,072 square meters and capacity for 3,500 graves, as stated in the contract. In these 48 years, about 490 have been dug, estimates León Benmayor, a member of Hevra Kadisha, the volunteer group that manages Jewish burials and ensures that the precepts of religious law are adapted to Spanish legislation. Jewish law requires, among other things, that bodies be buried in the ground; niches are not accepted.
Until now, the graves have been dug in the flattest parts of the land, but the space has been running out. In 2021, they started the procedures to build tombs in areas that are more steep and difficult to access, which involves more extensive works, explains Benmayor.
Cementiris de Barcelona is responsible for the urbanization works, while the CIB pays for the maintenance of the tombs. In April 2021, the municipal public company presented to Cerdanyola City Council the urbanization and construction project for 68 tombs, with an estimated value of the works of 750,000 euros.
The request was a novelty for Cerdanyola. The Jewish compound used to be in the municipal area of ??Montcada i Reixac, but a few years ago, with a change in the layout of the border between the two towns, it moved to Cerdanyola.
Barcelona Cemeteries emphasize that Montcada, where most of the Collserola cemetery is still located, takes between four and six months to grant them a building permit. In Cerdanyola, the process has been much longer and more complex. “The problem is that we have been asked to process a specific action project (PAE) because, according to the City Council’s technicians, the current planning approach does not include the possibility of making tombs in the CIB premises”, they explain from the municipal company. To process the PAE, a multitude of reports must be requested from different bodies, which inevitably lengthens the process.
Unease in the Jewish community has been increasing over time, to the point that in some circles the specter of an anti-Jewish boycott is stirring. Benmayor is clear that these are baseless speculations: “This is a problem of bureaucracy, not anti-Semitism”.
Given the alarming lack of graves, in September 2023 Cerdanyola granted an emergency work permit for seven tombs, which were finished two months ago. Added to an already existing one, today there are eight tombs.
Although they are double-compartmented, the people of Hevra Kadisha usually bury one person in each grave, unless the family requests it, Benmayor explains. They do an average of 15 to 20 burials a year. Atid, another Jewish organization in Barcelona, ??has a small esplanade for its own burials in the grounds, lent by the CIB.
Eulàlia Mimó, Councilor for Urban Planning of Cerdanyola, claims that they have fulfilled their obligations. “The Jewish cemetery is located in a natural park, which is also part of the Natura 2000 network, and this cataloging involves a series of environmental conditions that affect them as well as anyone who wants to do an activity in the park”.
On Thursday, to questions from this newspaper, Mimó replied that there was still “a problem with the environmental assessment report” and that they were looking at how to solve it. On Friday, in a new conversation, the councilor assured that there was finally no problem with the aforementioned report and that, in fact, Cerdanyola City Council hopes to be able to approve the PAE “probably next week”.