Editor's Note:  The Kings Park Jewish Cemetery is 3-4 acre Jewish burial ground located in a residential area of Suffolk County, NY, straddling the Smithtown/Commack border.  Officially, the cemetery has no "parent" organization (e.g. a synagogue or larger Jewish institution).  Unfortunately, the cemetery has absolutely no assets and relies, for maintenance purposes, on two benefactors who cover basic seasonal maintenance services.  In addition, the cemetery receives support from local volunteers, including committed Boy Scouts.  In the late 1980's/early 1990's, the cemetery was regularly vandalized to the point where all headstones were removed and piled in the back of the cemetery. Please click here for more photos.   

For my Eagle Scout service project I wanted to choose a project that would not only be beneficial to a community but would also be meaningful. When I first came up with the idea to help clean a Jewish cemetery,  my mentor, Mr. Steven Cahn, put me in touch with Mr. Andy Schultz, Executive Director of CAJAC - The Community Association for Jewish At-Risk Cemeteries. He mentioned about a cemetery in Long Island with a great history that was in need of cleaning.  

I researched the cemetery's history and spoke to those involved and felt this was a project I wanted to be involved in. Our rabbis teach that one of the greatest mitzvos (commandments) is giving proper respect to the dead. It is an altruistic mitzvah that the beneficiaries cannot pay back.

I gathered several troops from both within the community and outside and together we raked and removed branches, cleared debris, and uncovered many tombstones. I had the privilege of working with both Andy and Mrs. Phyllis Stein, a member of the local community whose family members are buried in the cemetery.

I was truly happy with the outcome of the project and pleased to know that more people are now aware of the cemetery and will maintain the cemetery in the future. 

Was it bashert?* When Touro Law Center moved to its new building in Central Islip in 2007, no one had any idea that the school, which is under Jewish auspices, was located immediately adjacent to a Jewish cemetery. The property on which the law school was built was formerly part of the Central Islip State Hospital (CISH), one of four giant state mental hospitals (along with Kings Park, Edgewood and Pilgrim State) built in Suffolk County in the late 19^th-early 20^th centuries.  At its peak in 1955, CISH was the second-largest mental hospital in the nation, housing over 10,000 patients, many drawn from New York City's most impoverished neighborhoods.  By the mid-1970s though, state budget woes and evolving policies for the treatment of the mentally ill led to the gradual closing of the hospital, which shut its door for good in 1996.

What remained was the potters' field, where over 5000 inmates had been buried over the 100 years the hospital existed, most forgotten and in paupers' graves marked only by numbered stones. A portion of the cemetery, with an estimated 500 graves, was set aside for Jewish patients.

In 1983, Rabbi Melvyn Lerer, then the Jewish Chaplain at CISH (and now the Jewish Chaplain at Pilgrim State), arranged for the reconsecration of the Jewish portion of the cemetery, found funding for restoration, including a fence with a gate with the Star of David, and arranged for dignified burials with proper headstones.  By the mid-90s, though, the few remaining CISH patients had been moved elsewhere, the hospital was shut down, and the cemetery was closed.  The state sold off much of the property, to the New York Institute of Technology, the federal government for a courthouse, to the LI Ducks baseball team, for shopping centers, condos, and to Touro. Responsibility for the cemetery passed to the New York State Office of Mental Health, which fenced it off, restricted public access, and provided minimal maintenance, not much beyond an occasional grass mowing and clean up.  Other than a yearly service arranged by Rabbi Lerer with the congregation of the North Shore Jewish Center in Port Jefferson, the souls in the cemetery were once again forgotten. Relatives of the deceased were unable to visit their loved ones, and family members could not find details about relatives buried there.

Shortly after Touro arrived in Central Islip, staffers heard stories about the cemetery, and a couple of intrepid explorers made their way through the brambles and discovered a beautiful, serene place hidden from public view, within yards of the Southern State Parkway and the federal courthouse, where thousands of people pass each day having no idea of the history, and tragedy, that lies just beyond the rusted fence.

Touro organized local community groups, brought in the national non-profit Community Association for At-Risk Jewish Cemeteries (CAJAC, see http://cajac.us), and reached an agreement with the State Office of Mental Health to allow Touro and CAJAC to renovate the cemetery, starting with the Jewish portion, build a suitably dignified entrance from Touro property, and assist family members and researchers get access to state records to locate the graves of their relatives. The renovations will be funded by grants, Touro contributions and through fundraising.

Early research has revealed that at least two notables found their final resting place in the cemetery: the distinguished African American artist William Henry Johnson (1901-1970), who spent the last 23 years of his life in CISH, and the controversial author and feminist Edna Gertrude Beasley (1892-1955), who was an inmate for her final 27 years, even though, as one of her brothers wrote, "she was no more crazy than you or I" and even ran the hospital's bookkeeping department.  He implied that newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who owned several of the publications Beasley wrote for as a journalist, had her committed.