An Opinion No One Asked For

The Plots Thicken

When I was serving Congregation Beth Elohim as its senior rabbi, I received a peculiar phone call one day from a man offering me 150 cemetery plots in the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens. This is one of my favorite spots in New York City so naturally I was intrigued. I was also knowledgable enough to understand that one doesn’t just offer someone plots on the fly. This was gonna be good.

He told me the reason for his call. His family had been members of CBE at the beginning of the 20th century, just when the synagogue was embarking on a major building campaign to construct its now famous Temple House — with a basement gym and pool and then five floors of social hall, ballroom, offices, classrooms and handball courts. And a beautiful chapel.

Part of a trend in the early twentieth century known as the Synagogue Center Movement (see Shul with the Pool) CBE and the Brooklyn Jewish Center on Eastern Parkway, were pivoting to what today we would call an “outreach” or “engagement” model of “meeting Jews where they are at.” Secularizing American Jews were less keen on religion and spirituality and more into what George Mosse called bildung — moral improvement through education — and what the early Zionist thinker Max Nordau referred to as Muskeljudentum — the building up of strong Jews that the Diaspora had weakened. The synagogue center movement would morph into what we commonly know as the JCC movement, a non-religious entree to Jewish life that is more appealing to some.

Anyway, on the way to building the Temple House, the stock market crashed, dashing plans for the fundraising necessary to finish the job. The synagogue needed funds and received money from a wealthy family in the community, in exchange for those 150 cemetery plots, no small sum by any measure.

But within two generations the family had left the Jewish faith, a familiar pattern of assimilation for many American communities. And now these formerly Jewish (let’s call them Episcopalian) had a rather valuable asset that they couldn’t do much with. For nearly 40 years, they tried, unsuccessfully, to give the plots back. They simply didn’t want or need them anymore.

But New York State cemetery law is not that simple. You can’t just move around property like that when it is bound up in tax codes and other regulatory statutes. In fact, when I became rabbi at CBE in 2005, I inherited a file that was two inches thick of various failed efforts to rectify this noble plot plot. Past leaders had tried and fallen short. I was determined to succeed.

I called my friend Nick Pisano, who knows a thing or two about New York State cemetery law and he cut to the quick. The family in question needed to first deed the plots back to the cemetery and then we would have a certain amount of time (I remember it was two weeks) to claim them for the synagogue which originally sold them.

The day Nick and I showed up at Mount Carmel to meet with the cemetery manager, she took one look at us, heard what we were there to do and said, “I was afraid you would get your act together.”

What she knew and we knew was that those plots are very valuable pieces of property. Graves at Mount Carmel range in price from $6500 to $19,500 (after all, you could be buried within spitting distance of Sholem Aleichem, Bella Abzug, Benny Leonard, Henny Youngman, and the Marx Brothers’ parents!).

Do the math. There was money to be made. And in 2015 we had a leaky, worn out pair of buildings and a growing community of Jews looking for their own new connection to eternal Jewish values. Monetize the plots! Invest in the buildings and the future!

Cemetery law requires that congregations can only sell their plots to congregants and for whatever reason, CBE members were not rushing to buy the new acquisitions. Now, to be clear, those eye-popping numbers above are what Mount Carmel charges to people who come in off the street, which these days, are Jews from the former Soviet Union, who are generally unaffiliated with synagogue life. Mrs. “I was afraid you would get your act together” would have been very happy selling 150 plots at $10,000 apiece which is worth $1.5 million. (In fact, on a recent trip, I stood on line in the office behind three separate families all looking to buy multiple plots.) But as a membership organization, synagogues can, and usually set their own much lower prices as a privilege of membership.

But guess what? In the nearly ten years since the deal went down, the plots are still mostly empty. There is a vast, open area with stunning views of Manhattan that is virtually empty of the dead and their markers. Whether it is a generalized secular Jewish ambivalence; a lack of connection to ancient ritual; a growing interest in “green-burials” and composting bodies or just straight up cremation; the plots remain the same — unsold.

My idea, rejected at the time by the board, was to “do outreach” to many of these Jewish families from the FSU who were happy to pay premium prices to bury their dead. No ambivalence about the mitzvah of a proper Jewish burial for these Jews. (In fact, cemetery plots, charity funds and Hebrew schools have been the first three things new Jewish communities establish when they settle in a new land.) Offer them Lifetime Membership at CBE which would include high holy days tickets; a bar/bat mitzvah for their kids; burial plots and a guaranteed rabbi or cantor to officiate at a funeral. Pick a number. Multiply it by 150 and my guess is you’ve easily raised $2 million for current Jewish life: education, social justice programs, summer camps scholarships; Israel trips. Huge missed opportunity, and I’ve often wondered why.

Usually it comes down to the questions of what are the benefits and limits of membership with regard to American synagogues? Over the course of our more than 150 years in America, we have organized by denomination — Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Non-Denominational, Transdenominational, Secular, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Gay and Lesbian. We provide so many options for affiliation, which is generally a good thing, since it has guaranteed equality of access to Judaism. But one can’t help but wonder whether or not we’re missing the forest for the trees.

Remember the old joke about the Jew on the desert island who builds two synagogues: one to pray in and one he’d never set foot in?! How does a diversified set of ideologies and practices make us more welcoming to one another? How does it raise barriers to entry? Further, how welcoming are we really with our ideological justifications for and divisions into the Judaisms we practice?

And if its true as demographers have been arguing for a generation, that most Jews choose their synagogue affiliation NOT by denomination by its proximity to home, the rabbi who leads it (whoever she, he or they are) and their friends who go there, then it’s also true that individual preferences supersede notions of the collective whole, don’t they? Community in all its messiness is supplanted by aggregations of individuals. In particular neighborhoods. A kind of walled-off, even self-selecting exclusiveness. Are the Jews of Park Slope the same as the Jews of Eastern Parkway? South Brooklyn? Williamsburg? Flatbush? What defines a community? Sameness or diversity?

One common objection to my Plots Plot from some leaders in the community was a kind of quietly articulated, “Yes, but would they really be members of our community?” I guess it was too uncomfortable to admit that it was okay for our Jews to attend synagogue once a year; but the unwashed masses from somewhere else with their gaudy black granite polished stones in the boneyard? Not so much, apparently. They belong to the shul I’d never set foot in.

I don’t know. The older I get, the more the tradition’s directness speaks to me; the more I am open to and connected with Jews from everywhere; the more the idea of membership in any organization makes me uncomfortable. If the Torah speaks to all of us, then it speaks to all of us. Why we spend so much time splitting hairs when there’s a planet to save is beyond me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for paying dues. I’d just prefer to call it tzedakah, with no benefits. The rabbis say that’s Torah Lishmah. Torah for its own sake. Just call me a member of the Jewish People. Which kind? The Trying Kind.

I was at Mount Carmel last week on my bike. I said Kaddish at the graves of old friends and heroes, roamed around the byways of American Jewish history, soaked up the sun in an expanse of grass known as the CBE Plots that if treated right, could yield a real investment in Jewish life today.

It’s just my opinion. Do the math.