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Atlanta synagogue says cemetery is not allowing it to practice Jewish traditions. The shul plans to sue.

Beth Jacob is an 80-year-old Orthodox congregation near Emory University. (Disclosure: It’s where I had my bris, bar mitzvah and wedding.) It has long put up temporary markers at the local cemetery while it waits for headstones to be built, a practice they say is rooted in Jewish tradition. But the cemetery has now banned those markers, igniting a battle which may end up in court.

The case: David Schoen, a congregant of Beth Jacob who defended former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, said that when he visited the cemetery recently he was unable to tell where recently interred people were buried. Along with a fellow congregant, Mark Goldfeder, a former law professor who leads the National Jewish Advocacy Center, they are preparing a federal suit on behalf of the synagogue that they plan to file this week.

The allegation: Blake Blomquist, the owner of the cemetery’s management company, said that the synagogues’ intransigence over the markers comes down to money. He alleged that someone at the synagogue gets a commission for sending families of the bereaved to a particular company to buy their headstone. So the reason the synagogue needs the temporary markers, he holds, is so families can wait for this company to make and deliver it. “Everybody over there at that synagogue has got their fingers in the cookie jar,” he said. The synagogue denies this accusation.

The expectation: “People bought plots there with the understanding that their religious traditions would be respected,” said Goldfeder. “This is a fight that seems so unnecessary.”

Related: What do you do with a Jewish cemetery in a town without Jews?

ALSO FROM THE FORWARD

(Nora Berman)

Opinion | A canceled JCC book talk shows Jews are entering a dangerous era of self-censorship: “Teachers who are worried a certain lesson might threaten their teaching licenses now decide to swap a less interesting text into their curriculum just to be safe,” writes Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America. Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, is now banned in several school districts. “We know about those cases. What we don’t know is how many copies of Maus were discretely removed from library and classroom shelves to avoid that ‘complicated’ politics of antisemitism.” Read her essay ➤

Under fire for pledging to cut aid to Israel, Vivek Ramaswamy says he’s outspoken just like Israelis: “That level of candor and speaking without artificial filters is exactly what me and many Israelis have in common,” the GOP presidential candidate told our senior political reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, in an interview this weekend. “I bring the same Israeli spirit of candor to the relationship. And it is why I have such a kinship with people in Israel and why we like each other so much.” Read the story ➤

(Getty)

Plus…

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to meet with Elon Musk during a trip to Silicon Valley next week.
  
  
• How did I end up holding a jar filled with Albert Einstein’s actual brain? Our editor-in-chief, Jodi Rudoren, explains in her latest column.
  
  
• Our editor-at-large, Robin Washington, recalls what it was like being forced to work on Rosh Hashanah – at a shul.
  
  
• Controversy at Yad Vashem, Portugal’s law of return for Jews and Israel’s flag football team. Take our weekly news quiz.

WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY

A woman walks past the rubble after an earthquake in Morocco this weekend. (Getty)

??  Israeli and Jewish rescue groups arrived in Morocco on Sunday to help after a devastating earthquake killed thousands of people. The country’s etrog farms, where hundreds of thousands of etrogs for the Sukkot holiday are grown annually, seem to have been spared. (JTA)

??  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering softening his controversial judicial overhaul legislation. The news comes ahead of Tuesday’s hearing about the legislation at the country’s top court. (Haaretz)

??  Tens of thousands of Jews make an annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav’s tomb in Uman, Ukraine. But on Sunday Netanyahu warned Israelis not to go, citing a lack of bomb shelters. (Haaretz)

?  Nearly 1 in 3 Jewish college students has witnessed or experienced antisemitism on campus, according to a new survey. Another new survey found that number to be higher at 57%. (JTA, The Hill)

✝️  The Vatican on Sunday beatified a Polish family who were executed by the Nazis during World War II for sheltering Jews. Pope Francis said the family “represented a ray of light in the darkness” and should be a model for everyone in “doing good and in the service of those in need.” (AP)

⚖️  A woman who was refused a get by her husband took to social media to air her grievances. When the posts went viral, the man claimed he was being harassed and threatened. But a New Jersey court ruled in the wife’s favor, saying her social media activism was protected speech. (JTA)

?  The Orthodox Union granted kosher supervision to a brand of lab-grown meat. The agency said it cannot be eaten with dairy since it’s derived from an animal and looks exactly like meat. (JTA)

?  More than a minyan of 10 Jewish staffers at the State Department gathered in an office recently for afternoon prayers so that Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. antisemitism envoy, could say kaddish for her mom’s yahrtzeit. (Jewish Insider)

Shiva call ➤  Violet Spevack, who for 50 years penned a weekly society column for the Cleveland Jewish News, died at 107.

What else we’re reading ➤  Elon Musk’s antisemitism problem isn’t about free speech … Buenos Aires to rename subway station after Jewish woman who famously stood up to sex traffickers … The co-creator of Shtisel identifies as Orthodox again.

ON THE CALENDAR

On this day in history (1891): Baron Maurice de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association, with the goal of creating new Jewish settlements in North and South America and Ottoman-era Palestine populated by Eastern European Jewish emigres. Hirsch’s project had little in common with Zionism: He believed the future of the Jewish people depended on their secularization. With his new association — which still operates in Israel today, as the Jewish Charitable Association — he aimed “to give a portion of my companions in faith the possibility of finding a new existence, primarily as farmers … in those lands where the laws and religious tolerance permit them to carry on the struggle for existence,” Robert Zaretsky wrote in a recent story for the Forward about the Jews of North Dakota.

It’s the 22nd anniversary of 9/11. We asked Forward readers to share their stories of that tragic day.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Yiddish singer Lucette van den Berg performs the song, “The Ballad of September 11,” which was composed by the late poet and songwriter Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman several days after the attacks.

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Thanks to Jake Wasserman and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter, and to Beth Harpaz for editing it. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com.