Los Angeles Jewish Cemetery Pays $80M to Settle Body-Dumping Suit
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
A Los Angeles Jewish cemetery accused of dumping remains to make room for new interments has settled a 25,000-person class action lawsuit.
Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, Calif., agreed to a settlement worth about $80.5 million, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal reported, citing documents filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Feb. 27.
The lawsuit was filed in 2009. It claimed that Eden Memorial Park, one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in the United States, instructed groundskeepers to “secretly break concrete vaults with a backhoe and remove, dump and/or discard the human remains, including human skulls, to make room for new interments.” The alleged incidents began as early as 1985.
About 40,000 people are buried in the 72-acre cemetery.
The settlement will be finalized in mid-May. The case went to trial last month in the Los Angeles Superior Courthouse.
Eden Memorial Park is owned and operated by SCI California, a subsidiary of Texas-based Service Corporation International (SCI), the largest operator of cemeteries and funeral services in the United States.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
