Washington Cemetery (Brooklyn)
The Washington Cemetery is a historic cemetery in the New York district of Brooklyn . Soon after it opened, it became the central Jewish cemetery and is now the largest Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn.
location
The entire cemetery consists of five numbered cemeteries. They are all around the Bay Parkway subway station on the F line to Coney Island , which runs above ground here and offers a view of the entire extensive cemetery area.
All five cemeteries have their own gates. The oldest of them, Cemetery # 1, is east of McDonald Avenue and the subway station and is also the largest of them. The administration building stands on it. Cemeteries # 2, 3, 4, and 5 are west of McDonald Avenue to 19th Avenue.
history
Washington Cemetery owes its creation to the Rural Cemetery Act of 1847, which allowed the establishment of commercially managed park cemeteries in New York outside the city limits (the then part of Kings County, an unincorporated area where Washington is today Cemetery was not part of Brooklyn and Brooklyn itself was not yet incorporated into New York City).
The cemetery was established on part of his property by James Arlington Bennet in the 1840s . Officially it has been a cemetery since 1850, and in 1857 it was consecrated as a Jewish cemetery. In 1886 the cemetery area was around 100 acres (about 40 hectares), of which 35 acres were rented to various Jewish burial communities and 65 acres were available as individual graves. Since 2010 there have been no more free grave plots in the cemetery with over 100,000 graves.
In the 1970s and 1980s, New York (and Brooklyn) experienced a strong wave of Jewish immigrants from what was then the Soviet Union . Most settled near Brighton Beach on Coney Island (now popularly known as "Little Odessa"), where they still live today. Washington Cemetery, which is only a few subway stops (or minutes by car) away, has become the preferred cemetery for this Jewish community - you will find many gravestones with Cyrillic script there.
Known Buried People
- Joseph Edelstein (1858–1940) - artistic director of the Yiddish Theater
- Pauline Edelstein (1866–1942) - actress at the Yiddish Theater, wife of Joseph Edelstein
- Abraham Goldfaden , Yiddish folk poet and composer, is considered the founder of modern Yiddish theater
- Jakob Gordin , Yiddish author
- Louis B. Heller , American lawyer and politician
- Moses Horowitz , Yiddish playwright and theater director
- Sigmund Mogulesko (1858–1914) - Yiddish actor, singer and composer
- Lilyan Tashman , American actress
- "Big" Jack Zelig (1888–1912) - Jewish gangster, one of the last leaders of the Eastman Gang
- Eliakum Zunser , Russian Yiddish folk singer
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Washington Cemetery , Bedricht from the New York City Cemetery Project, online at: nycemetery.wordpress.com / ...
- ↑ WASHINGTON CEMETERY, Borough Park - Midwood , in: Forgotten New York, online at: forgotten-ny.com / ...
- ↑ a b Mapleton and Washington Cemetery: a brief history , report from the Brooklyn portal The Weekly Nabe, online at: theweeklynabe.com / ...
- ↑ a b A Grave Situation: Space Scarce In Brooklyn's Crowded Cemeteries , report by the Brooklyn portal The Brooklyn Ink, online at: brooklynink.org / ...
- ↑ a b Graves' End. What happens when the biggest Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn runs out of room? , in: BKLYNR 2/18. April 2013, online at: bklynr.com / ...
- ↑ City Cemeteries Face Gridlock , in: The New York Times, August 13, 2010, online at: nytimes.com / ...
Web links
Coordinates: 40 ° 37 ′ 12 " N , 73 ° 58 ′ 35" W.