[1] Elias David Sassoon, a leading Bombay merchant and banker, created the cemetery in January 1878 in memory of his son Joseph, who had died at Shanghai in 1868.
[2] The cemetery has declined since the days when there was a large community of Jews in Bombay, with numbers falling during the second half of the 20th century from around 7,000 to only a small fraction of that.
A third mausoleum is that of Sir Albert Abdullah David Sassoon, 1st Baronet (1818–1896),[2] who in the event was buried in England.
[3] In 2014, the cemetery was reported to be "overrun with weeds" and still used largely by the small Baghdadi Jewish community, said to number just over a hundred.
While some Israelis were also being buried, they were usually ones related to the Baghdadi Jews.