How Jerusalem is dealing with a grave shortage

WALKING THROUGH the Minharot Olam (Perpetual Tunnels) project in Jerusalem is like navigating a massive honeycomb. The developers have cut a mile (1.6km) of tunnels through the earth that are over 50ft (16 metres) high. Some are 18 storeys below ground. Within each, giant drills have burrowed thousands of holes into the walls and ground. Soon they will be filled not with honey, but bodies: 23,000 of them, to be exact.

This subterranean city of the dead, inaugurated on October 30th, lies beneath Har HaMenuchot, Jerusalem’s largest cemetery, which is nearly full. Other local graveyards are already out of space; hence this novel solution. In some parts of Har HaMenuchot the dead are in high-rise structures. But these are costly and still take up a lot of space. Building down leaves more land for the living.

That is crucial for Jerusalem, where a growing population competes for scarce land—even the parts not imbued with religious meaning. A Jewish preference for burial (rather than cremation) sharpens the problem. Thousands of graves must be dug every year. “We’ve dreamed of going underground for 30 years,” says Hananya Shachor of the Jerusalem Community Burial Society, a non-profit outfit that commissioned Minharot Olam. “But we had to wait until the engineers could come up with a plan to do it at a manageable price.”...

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