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Went to the Beth David Cemetery in Elmont NY to visit the family grave sites, one of my current semi-annual initiatives. It had been a long time since my last visit. While the extended maternal family chose their eternity at that site, my destination was my mother and maternal grandparents, though I also try to ascertain the new arrivals. I knew about my second cousin, a woman born just two weeks after me, who succumbed to a smoking generated malignancy. I found her site off in a corner. The widow of somebody else entered since my last time there. And I found, somewhat unexpectedly, the resting place of my maternal grandmother's sister and her husband.
The place is huge, an estimated 250,000 burials. It is also largely computerized, so the main office can tell which block and burial society but not locate an individual grave beyond that. Some hit and miss is required. And not planning to spend a lot of time there, I know I did not encounter quite a few seen on prior visits.
There's some larger Jewish history to be gleaned. Traditionally, when Jews settled in a new place, their first communal need was for a burial site for which land was purchased. A Torah Parsha in Genesis describes the first such purchase, at an outrageous sum even then, but it establishes ownership and permanence. As Europeans populated NYC, land was also purchased, using agents known as Burial Societies which purchased blocks seen in the cemeteries today, then sold portions to consumers in the form of society memberships. Our family joined Adolph Ullman, which has a stone arched entry noting the society and the Ullman family graves as you enter the arch. My family's locations are scattered, though not entirely random within the assigned block. My cousin lies at the very edge as new space became scarce, though still available. Some had large monuments with family or multiple nuclear family names with foot stones for the individual sites. My grandparents and mother had their own headstones, as did the vast majority of the Adolph Ullman Society burials.
The three people I sought out had each been interred there more than fifty years, all dying within ten years of the others. When my children were six or so years old, before their Hebrew School enrollments, I took them there individually for their first Hebrew reading introduction. Both are named after people interred there for their first names. After a day at the Statue of Liberty and a Kosher lunch out, I drove them to Beth David, found the sites of my mother and grandparents, then had them read their names off the matzevot. The knew their names but not what it looked like in writing. They knew they were named to memorialize an ancestor, which is our tradition, but this made the ancestor more tangible.
Nature proceeds, even in cemeteries. New people that I once knew enter. Those I didn't realize were there for eternity appear as I walked from the Adolph Ullman arch to the other side of the tract where I parked my car, scanning for familiar names as I traversed the area. Plants also grow. My parents and grandparents arranged for yew plantings which keep people from walking over the remains. The fee also included perpetual care. My children, now early career adults, could read their names on the monuments. Natural growth of yew shrubs over the ensuing decades no longer allows that. The family names peer above the yews' surface. The individual names are obscured by vegetation. Even moving those shrub's upper branches to read and photograph took some effort.
One other common tradition is to leave a stone found nearby an individual grave atop the monument as a sort of marker that the site has been visited. We did that. Other matzevot of our extended family also had a few stones, most small. I do not know how long a random rock will stay there, probably no more than a season or two, so we were not the only ones to visit our relatives. Don't know who stopped by or when, but it's reassuring that the memory of and obligations to our forebears remains ongoing.
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