Anshe Chesed Cemetery

The land here was a Confederate lunette — a fortification that saw battle May 19-22, 1863, during the siege. Within a decade, brothers Harris and Elias Kiersky sold and donated it to the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Anshe Chesed. It became a cemetery holding more than 1,100 marked graves, from antebellum settlers through the twentieth century, with at least 46 unmarked graves moved from an older Jewish cemetery whose own history is now lost. When Vicksburg was incorporated in 1825, twenty of its 3,000 residents were Jewish — merchants, physicians, lawyers, teachers from Bavaria, Prussia, and Alsace-Lorraine. By 1862, fifty Jewish families chartered the congregation. Four years later, ninety Jewish families owned thirty-five businesses. The Jewish population peaked in 1905 at 659 people. As of 2014, only about twenty remained. In 1862, Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11, expelling Jews from his military district — a command Lincoln revoked within weeks. The order stands as the most notorious act of official anti-Semitism in American history. The graves here mark families who stayed through expulsion, through the siege that turned the war, through Reconstruction, through a century of life in a river city that no longer holds the trade it once commanded. The cemetery is accessible but unstaffed. You go to see what outlasted the violence.