Cemetery Association expands its care
New sites added; shaimos burial scheduled November 23
This week, which included Veterans Day, is a particularly good time to look at the work of the Cemetery Association of Northern New Jersey, its executive vice president, Mickey Levine, said.
Mr. Levine’s interest in his volunteer job, to which he devotes a huge part of his time, is an inheritance. He was born in Paterson, the descendant of generations of leaders of Temple Emanuel of North Jersey, which moved from that city to Franklin Lakes generations ago, and is closing its doors for good right now.
The association owns and takes care of the largely neglected, often abandoned small cemeteries founded by first-generation American Jews who flourished in Bergen and Passaic counties’ small cities and large towns before they moved on to greener suburbs. It recently has grown; now it has taken on two cemeteries in Woodbridge. “We took over the Middlesex Jewish Cemetery Association,” Mr. Levine said. “They wanted to ensure their future and saw this as the way to do it.
As a result, “on January 1, we will be known as the Jewish Cemetery Association,” Mr. Levine said.
The association also has grown in Bergen County, with the addition of the cemetery in Saddle Brook owned by Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Teaneck.
It continues to sell graves. “We have graves to sell!” Mr. Levine said. “We probably do about 60 to 70 burials a year, and we sell graves all the time. Over time we have provided graves for indigent individuals, and we have ensured that when there are people who have graves in our cemeteries but do not have any family around, there is a minyan for those burials. “This year we provided graves for three elderly Jews who had no family,” Mr. Levine said. “Two of them had family who didn’t live in the area and were too elderly to travel. We made sure that these people had proper Jewish burials, and that they did not get buried alone.”
The association also buries books and other printed material. Jewish law mandates that nothing that holds the name of God may be discarded when it has become too shabby or too outdated to use. Instead, they must be buried. They must be treated with dignity. The Cemetery Association provides a plot for such unusable materials. “Normally we do one book burial a year, but this year there will be three,” Mr. Levine said. One will be on November 23, at B’nai Jeshurun’s cemetery. (See box.)
Another of the commission’s tasks is the preservation of old plaques and other memorabilia, particularly if they honor veterans.
The Wayne Y is now the Wayne Township Community Center, but even before it was the Y, it had been the YM-YWHA of Northern New Jersey. “There was a veterans’ memorial there, and there were two other veterans’ memorial plaques on the outside wall,” Mr. Levine said. The cemetery association took the plaques and put them on monuments in a memorial park it owns.
The association also marks veterans’ graves, many of which had gone unmarked. “We have to date marked over 400 of them, and this is an ongoing project,” Mr. Levine said. “It is important. If anybody knows of any veterans in our cemeteries, please let us know, and their graves will be marked.” He can be reached at meyer@cajfnj.org.
Work also is ongoing on the job of raising money “to mark two unmarked adult graves in our cemeteries, and to letter about 25 double headstones of adults who have been interred in our cemeteries but whose graves never have been marked.”
Why were the graves unmarked? “I can’t tell you,” Mr. Levine said. “They’re not new graves. People forget. Maybe the person who was buried had no next of kin. But we feel it’s important that all graves be marked.”
And why only the graves of adults? “There are no records around for children’s graves,” Mr. Levine said. “We know that there were sections set off for children, but there is no data, so we don’t know their names.”
The oldest graves in the association’s cemetery are from the late 1880s, Mr. Levine said. The unmarked ones hold adults who most likely were over 50 years old. “Clearly, they don’t have family anymore. We have tried to reach out, but our efforts have not been successful. But we continue to work with the community.
“We are out there to assure that old Jewish cemeteries are not forgotten, but that they are taken care of. We feel that we provide a great service to the Jewish community. We want people to know that we exist, and we are here to serve the community.”
Who: The Cemetery Association of North Jersey
What: Will bury books that contain the name of God — shaimos, they are called — according to halacha.
When: On Sunday, November 23, from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Where: In two graves at the Americus Cemetery on Midland Avenue in Saddle Brook.
What else to know: The association invites the community to bring shaimos for burial.
Bring them on Sunday; the association has no storage space for them before the burial.
Bring them in paper bags; bring your own bags or buy them at $1 each. If you bring books in boxes, milk crates, or any other containers, you’ll have to take those empty containers out with you.
Participants are asked to donate $5 per bag; if you have more than 10 bags, talk to Mr. Levine about the donation.
The cemetery association is looking for volunteers, particularly young ones, to help bury the books and at the same time learn about the association’s work.
Mr. Levine welcomes questions; call him at (917) 699-6057 or email him at meyer@cajfnj.org
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