[LINK] "A golden discovery of Judaism in the North"

[rfmcdonald]

In the history of Canada's Jews, the Yukon Territory doesn't particularly feature even though hundreds of Jews did take part in the Klondike gold rush. The most visible, or at least longest lasting, artifacts left behind by the brief Jewish heyday of Yukon are the Jewish cemeteries located in the communities of Dawson and Klondike. Work on maintaining and restoring the Klondike cemetery began at the end of the 1990s--this 1999 report on the restoration of the Klondike cemetery goes into some detail--and in The Globe and Mail this Saturday just past, Gary Mason took a look at the cemetery restoration program as it is right now.

It was a clear, hot June afternoon 10 years ago when Rick Karp and two friends crunched their way through a tangled, dense web of bushes and trees. But this is where their research indicated it was supposed to be, somewhere near what was now a horribly overgrown patch of land on the south slope of the hill that overlooked this historic Klondike town.

"And then one of us literally tripped over the old wooden arc that was once erected at its entrance," Mr. Karp recalled recently in his office in Whitehorse. "It was lying on the ground. You could barely see it. It was like this amazing archeological find."

What Mr. Karp and his friends had discovered were the remains of a long-forgotten, century-old Jewish cemetery, one that has a growing fascination among academics. Next week, a historian from Jerusalem's Hebrew University will arrive to take a first-hand look while carrying out research on the Jewish role in the gold rush.

"It's wonderful there is so much interest in this," said Mr. Karp, president of the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce, and point man for the Jewish community in Yukon.

Mr. Karp had no idea the cemetery existed until alerted by a Jewish physician and amateur historian from Minnesota who had earlier vacationed in Dawson City. When Dr. Norman Kagan saw the overgrown condition of the area where the cemetery was supposed to be, he phoned Mr. Karp and suggested its cleanup and restoration would be a wonderful project to mark the 100th anniversary of the gold rush.

"How could we not?" Mr. Karp said.