Mr. Abed Sayyed

Mr. Abed Sayyed

Jerusalem 2013

Since I watched a documentary on German TV containing an interview with the Arab keeper of the 3,000 years old Jewish cemetery of Mount of Olives, I wanted to meet this guy and (way more important) photograph him. What a pleasant surprise, then, that the taxi driver who drives my friend Ido and me to the Mount of Olives happens to know the cemetery keeper, and tells us where to find him. And so we found him under a nice olive tree, right at the entrance of the cemetery.
He told us that his name is Mr. Abed Sayyed, and invited us to mint tea, prepared with rain water collected (so he says) at his “office” ( The small room was consisting of a bed, a table, a chair, a little stove and kettle, and a shaving kit made of a shard of broken mirror and an old razor etc. ). We were very grateful, as we should be since normally non-Jewish visitors are not let in.
Mr. Sayyed is apparently 88. When I asked him since when is he working as a cemetery keeper, and Mr. Sayyed answered: "Before your grandfather was born!" In fact, he started working at the cemetery in 1939 and took over the job from his father.
Mr. Sayyed showed us articles about him in Israeli newspapers and it turns out that he is quite a "celebrity". He said that "he prefers dead Jews to live Jews", but then corrected himself and said diplomatically that "there are good and bad people everywhere".
Apart from Arabic he spoke fluent Hebrew and English, and to me he spoke some German. Absolutely lucid and very entertaining, we spent some pleasant time with him. He told us that Else Lasker-Schüler is buried in the cemetery and that he knew her himself. He also told us that he personally met Mr. Helmut Kohl. I couldn`t refrain from telling Mr. Sayyed that meeting Mr. Kohl may not be such a big honour.
At last he told us that he hopes that one of his 32 grandchildren will be his follower.