Cemetery Cleanup Countdown by Julie Wiener - The New York Jewish Week

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I would urge interested parties and individuals, local neighborhood and civic associations to assist with this clean up...

Anyone interested please contact me as I have reached out to the appropriate parties in an effort to make this happen...

I'd like to note that I have lived in Ozone Park for over 40 years and this cemetery has been in disrepair, neglected and vandalized for longer than I care to remember...

The photos for this posting are from an EyeMaze blog post entitled "The Journey" (click on photos to enlarge)...

Congregation must restore decrepit burial ground by High Holidays or face renewed litigation; new nonprofit to oversee abandoned graveyards.

Can Bayside Cemetery, the long-neglected Jewish burial ground, turn itself around in time for the High Holy Days?

That’s what officials with Shaare Zedek, the Upper West Side congregation that owns the 35,000-plot Ozone Park, Queens cemetery, are hoping.

A class-action lawsuit against Shaare Zedek and the historic cemetery — in which plaintiffs accused them of, among other things, breach of contract and improperly diverting money from the cemetery perpetual care fund — has been administratively closed until Sept. 26. The recent “tolling agreement” between the plaintiffs and defendants is to give the defendants time to clean up the cemetery and develop a long-term plan for its ongoing maintenance.

Established in the 1840s, Bayside Cemetery is riddled with overgrown weeds, fallen branches, toppled-over gravestones and vandalized mausoleums. Indeed, many sections of the cemetery are so overgrown that they are completely inaccessible, and large swaths look more like a rainforest than a burial ground.

Five years ago a group of Mormon volunteers launched a major cleanup effort there, but the cemetery has since returned to its previous, unkempt state.

If the plaintiffs, who are descendants of people buried at Bayside Cemetery, remain dissatisfied with the cemetery’s condition at the end of the tolling period, they have the right to immediately resume the litigation with an expedited schedule, according to assurances given by Judge Raymond Dearie in a March 28 pre-motion conference. The lawsuit was filed in United States District Court, Eastern District of New York.

“Our hope is that we can make substantial progress toward cleaning this thing up,” Stephen Axinn, Shaare Zedek’s attorney, told The Jewish Week. In the next few months, Shaare Zedek will oversee a major cleanup effort of the cemetery, he said. Axinn said a “righteous individual” who has experience managing Jewish cemeteries, but asked not to be publicly identified for fear of becoming ensnared in the lawsuit, has volunteered his “manpower and expertise” to clean Bayside. A $140,000 grant from UJA-Federation will defray his expenses.

In addition, Axinn said, Shaare Zedek is working with the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and other Jewish federation agencies to establish a nonprofit organization called the Community Association for Jewish At-Risk Cemeteries (CAJAC) that will raise funds for and assume responsibility for maintaining Bayside and other neglected Jewish cemeteries.

CAJAC was on the verge of hiring an executive director last fall, Axinn said, but its progress has been stymied by the class-action lawsuit filed in September, which apparently caused several interested job candidates to “shy away.”

In an e-mail statement, David Pollock, associate executive director of the JCRC, echoed Axinn’s assertion that the lawsuit had slowed momentum on CAJAC and the cemetery cleanup, saying, “the litigation had a chilling effect.”

“The current agreement gives the parties an opportunity to recreate the previous momentum. It will be a difficult challenge but everyone will do their best.”

Shaare Zedek has long contended that it lacks the resources to care for Bayside and that, because the majority of its plots were sold to now-defunct Jewish burial societies rather than congregants, responsibility for its care lies with the larger Jewish community, not the shul.

John Lucker, one of the plaintiffs, and the grandson of two people buried at Bayside, said he hopes Shaare Zedek and Bayside use the legal reprieve “to perform not just a onetime temporary Band-Aid fix to the problem.”

In addition to developing a long-term, viable plan for maintaining the cemetery, it is essential, said Lucker, “that the synagogue and the cemetery restore and create a financial endowment trust necessary to fulfill their perpetual care obligations.”

“Time will tell what the synagogue and cemetery are able to accomplish during this brief pause,” he said.