Sages, celebrities, veterans, crooks: Take a NY cemetery’s Jewish walks of fame – and infamy

NEW YORK — Mount Hebron Cemetery head Adam Ginsberg stopped before the gravestone of Ukrainian-born Yiddish tenor David Medoff, pulled out his phone, and pressed play. Medoff’s voice filled the air as he sang “Song of Praise” — despite the roar of an airliner descending toward nearby LaGuardia Airport.

Medoff’s grave is one stop on the cemetery’s Yiddish Walk of Fame self-guided audio tour, which grew out of Mount Hebron’s Legacy Foundation. The foundation seeks to preserve the contributions made by those interred in the cemetery for generations to come, including through an internship program launched in partnership with CUNY Queens College in 2019 that encourages students to unearth their stories.

“The stories here tell the remarkable contributions Jewish Americans have made to the city, the state and the country,” Ginsberg said on a recent drizzly morning spent walking and driving through the expansive cemetery with this reporter.

Bounded by the Long Island Expressway and the Van Wyck, the cemetery in the highly Jewish neighborhood of Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, was established in 1903 as the Jewish section of Cedar Grove Cemetery. While the entire 250-acre cemetery covers the former Spring Hill estate of the colonial governor Cadwallader Colden, the Jewish section occupies about 215 acres.

“The number of people buried here is staggering, it’s a city within a city,” Ginsberg said.

Since the first burial took place in 1909, 231,000 people have been buried at Mount Hebron. That’s a fraction of the nearly 5 million people buried in Queens.

“Yes, there are more dead people in Queens than living,” Ginsberg said, answering the question before it’s asked.

While the Legacy internship initially focused on Jewish war veterans buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery, it soon expanded to include everyone buried at both cemeteries. After finding the name of an individual or family, the students mine the cemetery’s digital archive for biographical information and meaningful anecdotes.

Ginsberg, who spent summers cutting grass and giving grave locations to visitors in a cemetery near where he grew up, is clearly at home among the silent stones.

“People ask me if it’s depressing to work here. I explain to them that it’s not at all depressing. It’s a way to do a service for people who need help at a difficult time,” he said.

“It’s also a huge responsibility to make sure you’re caring for the people here,” he said, referring to the dead.

A map pinned to the wall inside the cemetery office shows that from its inception, the cemetery was laid out in a way that would make a city planner jealous.

Clearly labeled blocks are divided into sections, or “society grounds.” This reflects the custom in many American Jewish cemeteries where families, community groups and burial societies purchased designated plots so they could be interred together.

In the Russian block, there are rows upon rows of polished granite stones, each bearing an etched likeness of the person buried beneath. Over in the Workman’s Circle section, more than 10,000 headstones crowd together.

Ginsberg drove deeper into the cemetery, past the Art Deco mausoleum with bronze doors that Barbra Streisand built in 1988 as her future resting place.

A few minutes later, he parked his car a short distance from several stones.

There lay the grave of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the word genocide, which led to the Genocide Convention after the Holocaust and was used in the Nuremberg Trials. Although Lemkin found refuge in the US in 1941, 49 members of his family were slaughtered in the Holocaust.

“It’s amazing that he’s here,” Ginsberg said.

Lemkin’s grave is one stop on the Holocaust Memorial Tour. This tour, which has 14 stops, includes several Holocaust memorials.

In the Ukraine block is the memorial to the town of Bukaczowce and in the Polish block rises the one to the residents of Wishnewitz.

Another memorial from immigrants and descendants of immigrants from Grodno (in what is now western Belarus) is unsparing in its language: “In memoriam to our dear parents, brothers and sisters of the city of Grodno and environs who were brutally persecuted and slain by the Nazis during World War II.”

Even the Yiddish Theater section has a memorial to the Holocaust. It reads, “Dedicated to the eternal memory of the members of the European Yiddish theatrical profession who were murdered by the Nazis and other tyrants.”

The self-guided tours are just one way the cemetery has found a second life.

The Yiddish Theater Alliance has recently started holding its annual ceremony, complete with klezmer music, on the grounds.

The cemetery has also partnered with a local ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps). Each year, on both Memorial and Veterans Day, students in the ROTC place flags before the graves of 2,500 Jewish veterans such as Hyman Matza. A simple epigraph on his stone reads: “I did my best.” Matza, who died in 2013 at the age of 92, helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp.

Ginsberg recounted how before he died Matza used to stop in the cemetery office to “express concerns” about the upkeep of his wife’s grave. In their many conversations, Matza never talked about his World War II service.

“He was a little Jewish grandpa. He was a sweet man. He never mentioned it, he never talked about how he liberated Dachau. What he must have seen. He was just a humble man,” Ginsberg said.

From there, it was a short drive to the grave of Rabbi Solomon Schechter. Born in Moldavia, Schechter was a renowned Talmudic authority and leader of Conservative Judaism. Several smooth stones have been placed on his grave.

Of course, like any city, there are sinners as well as do-gooders.

Standing atop a gently rolling hillside, Ginsberg points to a rather large stone slab flanked by trees.

It’s the grave of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. A notorious American Jewish organized crime figure, Buchalter was the head of a Mafia hit squad. In the 1930s, he partnered with Tony Lucchese, the Italian Mafia boss, to run New York City’s garment district. On March 4, 1944, he was executed at Sing Sing prison.

His grave is one of seven stops on the cemetery’s The Murder Inc., Mob Tour, which focuses on the lives and deaths of notorious Jewish gangsters.

At the end of the morning, the survey of Mount Hebron’s 250 acres complete, Ginsberg offered a final thought about the way his job as caretaker to the dead can foster meaningful connections with the living.

“What I love about this job is the way we are constantly unearthing stories and the palpable feeling I get when we learn about the contributions that these people made,” he said. “It’s all about remembrance and education.”