Oheb Shalom Cemetery

Oheb Shalom Cemetery is located at 1321 North Broad Street, Hillside, New Jersey. I justify this cemetery's inclusion in this Newark website by Meyer Ellenstein and Frank Grad being buried here, plus the fact that the old synagogue was located in Newark.

This is actually the second cemetery that Congregation Oheb Shalom owned and managed. Oheb's first cemetery plot was in the larger B'nai Abraham cemetery, located in the West Ward of Newark, south of South Orange Avenue. This cemetery in Hillside was organized in the first decade of the 1900s on land that I presume had been part of Evergreen Cemetery.

Like B'nai Jeshurun, Oheb Shalom moved around in its first few years before building a fine Moorish building on Prince Street and then a neoclassical structure on High Street. In 1958, Oheb Shalom became the first of Newark's "Big Three" synagogues to relocate to the suburbs, in this case, to South Orange.

While a congregational is moveable, a cemetery is not. This cemetery will always remain in Hillside. Unlike the West Ward Jewish cemeteries, which are attached to long-gone synagogues and burial societies, Oheb Shalom's cemetery is very well maintained. Oheb Shalom Cemetery operates in parallel to Oheb Shalom synagogue, but is technically an independent corporation.

In Judaism, a physical copy of the Bible is sacred. Anything with G-d's name written on it must be treated with respect, even a book or letter on a secular subject. When books or torah scrolls inevitably wear-out the tradition is to bury them in the ground or seal them up in a special chamber within a synagogue. The word "genezah" means "treasure."

The most famous genizah is the genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo, the so-called "Cairo genizah". The Cairo Genizah contains documents going back one thousand years and relate to many parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. The well-preserved papers have enormously enriched our understanding of the Bible, the Medieval Arab world, and the Jewish people.

Lazar Roth was a butcher in the vicinity of Prince Street who, according to Oheb Shalom historian David Schechner, "liked to do things in a big way." He stipulated that an honorary plaque with his name on it be as large as the honorary plaques for the rabbis themselves.

There are several reasons for the ban. The Bible says in Genesis 3:19: �For you are dust and to dust shall you return.� Above ground burial interferes with the body's reunion with the earth. Another reason is that gaudy tombs are considered superfluous when everyone is equal in death. A final reason is the belief that at the time of the messiah, the dead will travel through the ground to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where they will be resurrected. If the dead are not in the ground, this cannot occur.

The three identical tombs in the distance in this photo belong to members of the Hollander family.

Born in Austria, Frank Grad was educated at the Newark Arts School (the forerunner of Arts High School). He began his Newark architectural practice in 1906. Grad was capable of working in many styles, from the Beaux-Arts, YMHA on on MLK Boulevard, to the Spanish colonial Stanley Theater and Beth Israel Hospital, to the Neo-Classical Symphony Hall, to the Art Deco 1180 Raymond Boulevard (aka, the Lefcourt Building). Several of Grad's greatest commissions, the YMHA, the Stanley Theater, Beth Israel, and the Lefcourt Building, were for Jewish patrons. Like Meyer Ellenstein, Grad died shortly after the riots. His firm, Grad Associates was continued by his sons after Grad died. Grad Associates peaked in the 1980s when there were over 130 architects working there but closed in the winter of 2010, a victim of the Great Recession.