A former member of a Japanese boy band is taking to social media to tell the little-known stories of people buried in cemeteries across London.
Jono Namara, a former JFS student, began his “Cemetery Safari” video short series on TikTok in March of this year and has already racked up nearly 100,000 likes. He regularly receives tens of thousands of views on the shorts.
He researches, presents, and edits his videos, each with a running time of under two minutes. They have taken him across London’s most historic cemeteries including Brompton, Westminster, Mortlake and Pinner.
He has also produced shorts for BBC Reel, including one about the disastrous “Exercise Tiger” in Devon, a D-Day rehearsal gone wrong during the Second World War.
More recently, he received permission from United Synagogue to film in Alderney Road Jewish Cemetery, the oldest Ashkenazi cemetery in the UK.
There he created a short video on a mystical 18th century rabbi buried there, Samuel Falk, known as the “Ba’al Shem of London”, who was said to have been able to perform miracles thanks to a knowledge of the “secret names of God”.
It was said, Namara explained, that Rabbi Falk had telekinetic and transmutative powers and he had to flee from Germany after being charged with sorcery. He settled in East London in the early 1740s, and was credited with saving the Great Synagogue from a fire. He was also rumoured to be able to keep the wick of a candle burning for months.
Grave
Jono Namara (Photo: Handout)
Having grown up in north-west London, Namara left school to become a model at various fashion houses, including Balenciaga, and ended up living in Japan where he did television presenting and appeared in a number of commercials.
He also, though quite sure he “scrubbed the internet clean of it”, was briefly a member of a Japanese “J-Pop” boy band.
A self-described taphophile — a person interested in cemeteries — he says they provide “a sort of peaceful refuge; not a scary place at all; they’re all generally on sacred ground and they provide the opportunity of turning death and burial into not something static but educational.”
He first came up with the idea of telling the stories of interesting graves during a trip to Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Paris.
“I’ve always felt that there was a great amount of interest in this kind of telling of history, and social media platforms allow people to congregate and come together around that shared fascination,” he said.
Graves
Jono Namara (Photo: Handout)
His most watched short to date, which has amassed over half a million views on TikTok, is about a “time-travelling tomb” in Brompton Cemetery.
He explained: “Short form content, under two minutes long, provides a uniquely challenging dalliance of presenting, editing, and fitting everything in while keeping it entertaining.
"It also allows for interactivity and direct engagement with, hopefully, an audience.”
In the future he hopes to expand to graveyards across the UK and abroad.
A United Synagogue spokesperson said they oversee more than a dozen cemeteries across England and are the final resting places of “hundreds of thousands of members of the British Jewish community”, with “countless stories waiting to be told.”
US offers guided walks at the historic Willesden Jewish Cemetery.
To find out more, visit @cemeterysafari on TikTok or jononamara.com.
