Maine Group Aims To Preserve Historic Jewish Cemeteries
Image by Getty
A new nonprofit group has been established to preserve and restore Jewish cemeteries in southern Maine.
The newly established Southern Maine Jewish Cemetery Association has taken ownership of two historic Portland cemeteries that have fallen into disrepair and have toppled headstones, the Forecaster, a newspaper in Falmouth, Maine, reported.
The move comes as many aging American Jewish cemeteries are in states of disrepair due to inadequate financial planning and no new sources of revenue. A small, but growing number of Jewish communities — including in the Boston area, New York area and Cincinnati — have established or are creating nonprofit organizations to raise funds for and take over operation of these burial grounds.
One of the cemeteries taken over by the Southern Maine Jewish Cemetery Association, the Smith Street Cemetery in Portland, was established in 1875 and was Maine’s first Jewish cemetery. That cemetery has been full for 40 years.
The new group hopes to raise $1.2 million to fund operating costs and establish an endowment.
“One of the things we want to do is bring the cemeteries back into the communities,” the new group’s president, Wayne Goodman, told the Forecaster. “There is a lot of heritage there. There is a lot of learning to do there.”
Goodman was motivated to start the group when he discovered several headstones of family members had shifted, and he learned that the cemeteries lack funds for upkeep and repair because they have no new plots to sell and thus no revenue source.
“(The cemeteries) are going to be resource spenders, not revenue generators as they were 80 or 90 years ago,” he said. ” We have to build a reserve so we can take care of them into perpetuity.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
