About 400 headstones overturned in a vandalism spree in early January have been placed upright at the Poile Zedek Cemetery in New Brunswick. Photos by Debra Rubin
March 27, 2008
Less than three months after about 600 gravestones were either toppled or destroyed by four teens on a vandalism spree, much of a New Brunswick cemetery has been restored.
Hundreds of graves that had been uprooted now sit upright while others, too badly shattered to be repaired, have been temporarily reassembled and laid flat on the ground. Some are supported by wood beams on slabs of granite or concrete while others are tenuously held together by putty. The imprint of some of the toppled stones could still be seen in the soggy ground.
“It’s starting to look once again like a cemetery,” said Rabbi Abraham Mykoff, whose Orthodox New Brunswick congregation, Poile Zedek, shares the cemetery with Sephardi Congregation Etz Ahaim in Highland Park.
The imprint of an overturned headstone is still visible in the soggy ground.
Approximately 75 percent of all the cemetery’s headstones were either uprooted or broken during the early January incident.
Mykoff pointed out the construction that restored about 400 of the otherwise undamaged stones, some weighing as much as 1,000 pounds, “seemed most fitting during the month of Adar,” in the week leading up to Purim.
The work at the Joyce Kilmer Avenue cemetery was completed by contractors from American Memorial Erectors of Pequannock.
The $28,000 cost came from a fund established by the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County, which has collected about $100,000 from donors from all over the state and country. The company donated $5,000 of its costs, according to federation president Lee Livingston.
“The next priority of the federation is the repair and replacement of the stones of those deceased that have no living relatives,” he said. Most of the deceased for whom living relatives could not be found died in the early part of the last century, said Livingston.
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