Following the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1950s, Sudan’s Jews fled; there was almost no trace of the community except the small Jewish grave yard in downtown Khartoum — rubbish-strewn and littered with pieces of demolished Jewish gravestones. Chaim Motzen, a young Canadian, undertook a decades-long mission to restore a symbol of Sudan’s multicultural past.

Sudan has a small but rich Jewish history. In the 1900s, hundreds of Arabic-speaking Jews from across the Middle East lived in the Sudanese capital harmoniously alongside Muslims and Christians, working as merchants, business folk, doctors and lawyers. Black and white photos from the era show Khartoum’s Jews joyously celebrating bar mitzvahs and weddings, mingling seamlessly with the city’s other communities. But anti-Semitism washed across the Arab world at the start of the conflict with Israel, and the Jews fled.

When Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir came to power in 1989, the Jewish community came under serious attack. In the tiny graveyard, tombstones were smashed into thousands of pieces; marble slabs were looted; and local authorities allowed the site to become a dumping ground.

Chaim Motzen wanted to change all of that. He received permission from the Minister of Religious Affairs, Nasr Eldeen Mofarih, in the new transitional government to restore the site as a private individual. He paid for a Sudanese archaeologist and dozens of workers out of his own pocket, and he got to work.

Over several weeks, they removed truckloads of trash from the site — glass, car parts, medical waste, scorpions and beehives. Eventually, they discovered 71 graves and headstones smashed into fragments. Then for months, Mr. Motzen and the archaeologist laboriously pieced the Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions together like giant puzzles.

He then researched the names he found on the headstones and tracked down relatives, restoring physical links to family history thought lost.