Jewish Cemetery exhibit a must-see for Alabama history buffs

Jewish Cemetery at Claiborne, Ala.

Like many of you, I read with great interest that the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of South Alabama is celebrating Jewish Heritage Month with an exhibit that features the Jewish Cemetery at Claiborne.

The exhibit officially opened with a public reception Monday afternoon and will remain on display through June 30. The exhibit is located on the third floor of the Marx Library, the home of the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Marx Library is open seven days a week.

The Jewish cemetery at Claiborne is located on private property and is a unique reminder of how different life once was in Monroe County. In its heyday, Claiborne was a large frontier town on the Alabama River with a thriving merchant class. All walks of life could be found at Old Claiborne, including a sizeable Jewish community.

Sources say that the last burial at Claiborne’s Jewish cemetery occurred in 1899 and that the cemetery was vandalized in 1967. The cemetery contains at least 32 graves, probably more. Sources say that the oldest grave there belongs to a David Sanders, who died on Nov. 18, 1843.

Despite the age of the Jewish cemetery, there are few references to it in old editions of The Monroe Journal. The only reference to the cemetery prior to 1963 that I could find was in the July 10, 1958 edition of The Journal. That week’s paper published a story about Claiborne historian, Elizabeth S. Deer.

That story said that Deer, who moved to Claiborne in 1919, was preparing to write a history of Claiborne and had “amassed one of the largest collections of material owned by a single person” on Claiborne. “In addition to the Dellet or Torrey home, about the only lasting remains of the town is the old cemetery up the hill from the Claiborne-Murphy Bridge (dedicated Sept. 9, 1932, when Mrs. Deer was president of the Claiborne Historical Society), a Jewish Cemetery and a historical marker,” the story went on to say.

Some readers may be wondering why an exhibit about a Monroe County cemetery is being held at the Doy Leale McCall Library in Mobile. Doy Leale McCall Sr. was born in Etowah County in 1896 and after serving in World War I, he moved to Monroe County in 1922 to establish a sawmill. He eventually moved to Monroeville and got married, only to lose an arm in a 1927 sawmill accident.

Sources say that this injury left him with “time to indulge his passion for history and bottle collecting,” and during the ensuing years, he “amassed one of the largest archive of historical documents and bottles in the United States.” McCall died in 1971 and 40 years later – on May 6, 2011 – the archives at the University of South Alabama officially changed its name to the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book & Manuscript Library after McCall’s grandchildren donated a valuable and historically significant collection of 18th, 19th and 20th century documents amassed by McCall and valued at $3.1 million.