After decades of neglect, volunteers work to save a historic Main Line Jewish cemetery

A deep feeling of sadness hit Todd Borow when he saw the state of his great-great-grandfather’s grave in 2012.

He wasn’t prepared for the leaning headstone and the thick vegetation that covered the cemetery.

Borow’s father had visited Har Hasetim, a sprawling Jewish cemetery located off Conshohocken State Road in Gladwyne, when he was a child and the site had been in better condition.

“I was extremely sad to see how neglected the cemetery was,” he said, “but I was also empowered to try to figure out what I could do to help restore it.”

Rituals surrounding a traditional Jewish burial go back centuries and range from the practical — burial soon after death — to the symbolic, including mourners placing dirt in the grave. All are united by the concept of dignity, and allowing the gravesite to be neglected is a clear violation.

“It wasn’t just that my ancestors’ graves were left abandoned to be overtaken by a forest, but the graves of a thousand other local Jewish people,” he said.

Shortly after his visit, Borow joined an extraordinary effort spearheaded by nearby Beth David Reform Congregation to restore what is commonly referred to as the Gladwyne Jewish Memorial Cemetery.

The project, which began in 2015, is likely to go on for decades and has involved volunteers from the congregation and local schools, a Villanova University professor and his class, the Lower Merion Conservancy, and a craftsman who restores the headstones.

One of the congregation volunteers specializes in translating Hebrew and Yiddish into English, another in landscaping the property so invasive species don’t take hold and desirable species are labeled. Few of those involved have ancestors buried on the six-acre site and many — including Borow — are not Beth David members.

Dennis Montagna, a historian for the National Park Service who has consulted on Beth David’s project and other Jewish cemetery projects, says he knows of no other effort on this scale attempted by an individual congregation.

Har Hasetim, which translates from Hebrew to Mount of Olives, dates to the 1890s and is one of many cemeteries set up to accommodate the thousands of Jews who arrived in the United States around the turn of the century, in most cases to escape the pogroms of Europe.

The cemetery was founded by two burial societies — the Har Hasetim Association and the Independent Chevra Kadisho of Philadelphia — but ownership eventually was assumed by ICK.

The last burial there was in 1945, when Seaman Second Class Benjamin Schurr, a World War I veteran, died. In the years that followed, ICK struggled to afford the upkeep. As other burial grounds became available, the site deteriorated.

In the 1980s, the heirs to ICK’s first president, Julius Moskowitz, planned to sell the cemetery to a developer who wanted to dig up the bodies and have them buried in a Jewish cemetery in Upper Darby so the site could be cleared for luxury homes.

Gladwyne resident Richard Elkman said the plan might have succeeded were it not for his first-grade daughter’s field trip.

In fall 1988, he recalled, Molly Elkman came home after taking the trip to what her teacher had told the class was a Chinese cemetery across Conshohocken State Road from the Elkmans’ home.

When she showed her father rubbings from one of the headstones, he recognized that the inscription wasn’t in Chinese. He visited the cemetery and met some of the neighbors.

Shortly after, he got a call from an agitated neighbor telling him to rush to the site. There he saw the neighbor, hunting rifle in hand, confronting a terrified bulldozer operator.

Elkman called Lower Merion Police, who found that the operator had no permit for the excavation and told him to leave.

Elkman, an advertising executive now retired to Florida, followed his public relations instincts, calling a local TV station, notifying the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, and helping to start the Friends of Gladwyne Memorial Cemetery.

What followed was a decade-long legal battle over whether the heirs had the right to sell the property, with descendants of people buried there and Beth David, among others, fighting to stave off developers.

The battle ended in January 1999 when a settlement was reached in Montgomery County Orphans Court, turning the cemetery over to Beth David. Meanwhile, Har Hasetim deteriorated into a jungle of almost impenetrable vegetation and toppled and broken headstones.

Congregation members and other volunteers did periodic cleanup work but the restoration effort got a boost with the founding of Friends of the Gladwyne Jewish Memorial Cemetery in 2011, and the heaviest work started in 2015.

“It took us years just to find all the graves,” said Neil Sukonik, a Beth David member who heads the Friends group. And they’re not sure they actually have.

Joe Ferrannini spent about two decades after college in transportation management before making an unusual career switch to historic masonry. Now he restores gravestones.

He has worked on several restoration projects in the Philadelphia area, including the 2017 incident at Mount Carmel cemetery where more than 100 headstones were toppled by vandals.

Now he comes down from his upstate New York home during his “season” — the work can’t be done in cold weather — to work at Har Hasetim. He spends two weeks in the spring and two in the fall and estimates he has restored about 150 of the cemetery’s roughly 1,200 stones. Resetting each stone can take an hour to a full day or more.

“It’s such meaningful work,” he said. “These are people whose memories would be lost.”

Sukonik estimates that the group is spending about $50,000 a year on the project, mostly to support Ferrannini’s work, which started in 2017. Although the eventual cost has been estimated at about $1 million, Sukonik says the there is no way to really tell what it will come to.

Considerable research on the cemetery’s occupants was conducted about five years ago by a Villanova class led by Craig Bailey, an associate professor of history. Bailey said that about a dozen students checked databases and death certificates.

“It’s a very sad story,” Bailey said. “A majority [of those buried] were infants under the age of 1. "

Congregation members and local schools, including the Shipley School and Friends Central, have helped clean up the site on service days. Trails have been cleared and there are plans to develop contemplative spaces in the open areas.

Eventually, Sukonik says, the Friends hope to develop a website where a visitor can key in the plot and grave number and get details on who is buried there. There are also plans to put identifying markers on the trees in English and Latin and to add a monument to the deceased who can’t be identified.

Still to be solved, though, is the issue of access. There is no parking lot on the landlocked site, so it is reachable only on foot. Visitors usually start at Beth David and make the quarter-mile hike to the cemetery, through woods and along the roadside.

Any solution will probably involve complicated negotiations with neighborhood residents. But Sukonik is optimistic.

“Restoring the cemetery is a way of affirming that each person buried there matters, even if we don’t know their name,” said Beth David Rabbi Beth Kalisch. “It’s a project about history, but it’s also a project about the present — because we live in a world that so desperately needs the reminder of how valuable every single human life is.”