Hello, non Jew here (friendly Orthodox Christian).
In my home town, an old sparsely populated Gold Mining town that hasn't been relevant since the gold rush ended has a Jewish Cemetery that's contained within the Christian Cemetery. The space is separate and contains headstones written in Hebrew and a little bit of English, most of whom died in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
I was curious as to what the significance of the rocks on top of the headstones are?
During the really bad fires of NorCal this summer the Jewish Cemetery was extremely overgrown and there were fires raging in the county. The Jewish part of the cemetery is sort of kept up by a Jewish Organization focused on the preservation of the Pioneer Jews of America but due to Covid they probably didn't make it out there to keep it maintained. We had some volunteers agree to respectfully clear the weeds because of the fire and noticed that some stones were on top of the headstones. If I would see the stones on the ground in front of the stone I would put it back on the headstone because it seemed intentional.
Did we do anything wrong by doing that? We were respectful and just wanted to make sure the town didn't burn up, and even though we're not Jewish it's still part of the small towns small history.
Anyways, Im curious to know what the stones mean.
Or are they forbidden like tattoos
I was just watching a series on Netflix which mentioned the WeiΓensee Cemetery in Berlin, a massive Jewish cemetery established in the late 1800s, and containing over 100,000 graves.
This is a huge plot (over 100 acres), and in prime position in Berlin. Why didnβt the Nazis destroy and repurpose this land, considering the other atrocities they committed?
Could someone please help me? I think some of my family were Jewish, and I'd like to confirm this by checking for whether they're buried in the Jewish cemetery, they were from Basra. PM me for the names if you can help. I'd appreciate it so much. I can't go myself bc first of all I don't know Arabic, I also don't live in Iraq and can't travel there as I'm not an adult yet. I don't know the names in Arabic letters, I'm not sure if that's a problem bc you could just look for whatever sounds the most similar.
I was jogging on my usual route, which includes walking by two cemeteries about a mile from each other. This is a Boston suburb with a sizable lake extremely popular with walkers, joggers, and runners.
I'm walking by the Jewish cemetery and it's pretty close to the walking trail - like, the only thing separating you from it is a big iron fence. I'm thinking about how I never see anyone in there... then I notice there are two twenty somethings merely ten or fifteen feet away from me laying on a blanket in front of a grave stone, making out. What the hell?
When I turned around to walk back to where I started my walking route, they were still there, making out on top of a grave. In a Jewish cemetery. Two days before Yom Kippur, which is, uh... morbid, to say the least.
It would be morbid in any cemetery, but I personally found it weird the day I think "I've literally never seen anyone visiting this cemetery" it's two random people making out right before Yom Kippur.
Idgi. There are sprawling parks around and on that lake. They could have set up literally anywhere else and no one would have bothered them.
