Every so often, we post an item to remind readers that the challenges of dealing with abandoned Jewish cemeteries — while widespread and uphill in post-Holocaust, post-Communist Europe — also exist elsewhere.
Recent articles — with pictures — detail the situation of the abandoned Jewish cemetery in Lower Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia (a city with a thriving Jewish population of around 300,000 — or more than the total Jewish population of east-central Europe…) where volunteers are currently trying to raise money to clean it up and restore it.
Richard Ilgenfritz reports on the condition of the cemetery, which was founded in the 1890s and whose last burial was in 1945, in a recent article on the Mainline Media News web site.
Broken headstones, overgrown weeds, hard-to-read markers are what await anyone who might stumble upon Lower Merion’s abandoned cemetery […] Recently a group of volunteers formed an organization called the Friends of the Gladwyne Jewish Memorial Cemetery in an effort to rekindle interest in the site with the hopes of fixing it up..
Sound familiar?
An article in July by Kristin E. Holmes in the Philadelphia Inquirer told the story of the cemetery and detailed recent legal battles over ownership, which included plans in the 1980s to sell it to a developer who planned “to dig up the graves and develop the land,” moving the bodies to another Jewish cemetery.
“I got a call from a neighbor who said, there’s a bulldozer at the cemetery and they are going to bulldoze the graves,” said Richard Elkman, who created the Committee to Save the Gladwyne Jewish Cemetery. The neighbor “was out there with a shotgun to hold them off.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote:
The six-acre plot, where an estimated 1,000 Jews are buried, is a tangle of brush, weeds, and fallen branches. Wild growth surrounds the graves and markers, some upright, others toppled and broken.
The three-year-old Friends of the Gladwyne Jewish Memorial Cemetery, which is affiliated with the synagogue [Beth David Reform Congregation in Gladwyne] but includes people who are not, has commissioned a plan to clean up the cemetery and restore the graves and headstones, while preserving the plants and trees that are now the natural habitat.
The group envisions trails and contemplative spaces, and wants to research the histories of those buried at the cemetery. Digital mapping technology may be incorporated so that visitors can pick a gravestone and use a mobile device to discover the background of the person beneath it.
The transformation will cost more than $1 million, according to the group, which is developing a fund-raising plan.
See web site of the Friends of the Cemetery
See full Philadelphia Inquirer article
1 comment on “Abandoned Jewish cemeteries: not just in Europe!”
How was it allowed to degenerate into this disgraceful state in the first place?