Project looks to rehabilitate area Jewish cemeteries

 

Project looks to rehabilitate area Jewish cemeteries.

·         By Michele Alperin

 

·         Aug 29, 2023 Updated Aug 30, 2023

 

The Greater Trenton Jewish Cemetery Project works to restore overgrown cemeteries like the one pictured above.

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When attorney Albert Stark refurbished the graves of his great-grandparents, Samuel and Bessie Stark, little did he know how profoundly this act of respect would affect both himself and other descendants of the once-vibrant Trenton Jewish community.

As others followed Stark’s example and restored family grave sites, a number of native Trentonians came together, Stark says, “to do for the others what we had done for our own families.”

They created the Greater Trenton Jewish Cemetery Project in 2018 to rehabilitate five “orphaned” cemeteries on Pitman Avenue in Hamilton, and in February 2021 added People of Truth Memorial Section on Cedar Lane in Hamilton.

The project also committed itself to researching the people buried in these cemeteries and educating the wider public about them and the community they represent.

The work is ongoing in the cemeteries, whose graves date back to 1857. Much of the heavy landscaping that cleared brush and trees was completed in fall 2019.

Many fallen and tilting headstones have been reset and sunken areas filled in. New fencing surrounds the five cemeteries and the old iron gates on Pitman Avenue have been cleaned up and repainted.

As impressive as this amazing reclamation is, what for Stark has been most important about this project is how it has create a shared consciousness of Trenton’s Jewish communal history.

“The theme of the project was never to forget what these people who were buried there did for the community and their progeny,” Stark says. “And ‘never to forget’ has created a need to discover what’s been forgotten.”

“Not many of my generation had the opportunity or took the opportunity to really explore their past with their parents or grandparents, because a lot of what they went through was the war years and before that the Depression, and not many of the grandparents wanted to talk about that,” Stark says.

This project, Stark says, “caused me to appreciate more what it took for the people who came before me to make it possible for me to accomplish what I’ve been able to accomplish.”

What did it take, he asks, for his great-grandfather to leave his family in Vilnius to avoid a 35-year draft of thirty-five years and strike out on his own with no money, in his late teens or early 1920s

A conversation with his uncle about family, following his father’s death in 1994, inspired Stark to search for the grave of this great-grandfather, Samuel Meyer Stark, who settled in Trenton in 1878.

When Stark visited Samuel’s grave at the Brothers of Israel Cemetery at Liberty and Vroom Streets in Trenton, with his son-in-law Ryan Lilienthal, they were quite taken aback.

“We started going through the ivy that totally covered the grave, which had fallen over. We dusted it off, Ryan did a rubbing, and my great-grandfather’s name and date of death came up,” Stark said.

Walking through that cemetery, Stark said, “I saw graves in terrible shape, fallen over, collapsed, and I said to myself, ‘This is terrible to see [the graves of] these people who were heroes who came to Trenton and made it possible for us to be who we are.’”

Albert Stark was a founder of the Greater Trenton Jewish Cemetery Project, which looks to  rehabilitate area “orphaned” cemeteries.

Stark later found the grave of Samuel’s wife, Bessie, in the Workmen’s Circle Cemetery on Pitman Avenue in Hamilton, one of five Jewish cemeteries that sat abandoned and in disrepair because the organizations and synagogues responsible for maintaining were defunct. Weather, rain and encroaching brush and tree roots had left this row of cemeteries with fallen and tilting headstones and sunken graves.

Followed the detailed advice offered by a cemetery consultant, local contractor David Servetah of the New Jersey Monument Company handled the actual hands-on work. But before work could even begin, Stark’s daughter, Rachel Lilienthal Stark, got in touch with the defunct organizations that technically remained the cemetery owners and worked out agreements that gave the cemetery project the right to rehabilitate the cemeteries.

The six cemeteries are now all clearly marked and readily identifiable to visitors. The five on Pitman Avenue were largely established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they belonged to two synagogues, Ahavath Israel and Anshe Emes (People of Truth); Workmen’s Circle Branch 90 (a social and cultural fraternal order for Jewish laborers), Beth Sholom (lodge of a national Jewish fraternal organization), and Young Judaea (chapter of U.S. Zionist youth organization).

As the most pressing issues were resolved on the ground, the education committee began planning programs to educate the community about the cemetery and the Trenton Jewish community that thrived for many years. Jews came to the city in three waves: Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, German Jews between 1820 and 1840, and Russian and Eastern European Jews between 1881 and 1914.

Last spring the cemetery project held a cemetery tour that included presentations by several descendants, including one by Stark’s grandson, Jacob Lilienthal, 14, about his great-grandmother.

“It was like a seance,” Stark recalls. They were telling the person’s story in first person.” A similar program, this time including students from area religious schools, is planned for April.

On Sunday, Oct. 15, in one of the cemeteries the project will be opening a “geniza,” a burial place for no-longer-serviceable traditional and ritual objects that cannot be thrown away because they mention the name of God. Donation boxes at local synagogues and agencies will enabling area Jews to deposit such objects for future burial.

The project has also created a database on its website, gtjcp.org, that includes photographs of many of the stones as well as information about the people buried therein.

Stark’s family history in Trenton begins with his great-grandfather. Samuel worked first as a peddler in New York, visiting Trenton on weekends to purchase pottery to sell. In 1883 he moved to Trenton, where he became religious leader to nine German Jewish families who formed the core of what in 1883 became Brothers of Israel Synagogue.

Samuel’s son Louis lived for a period in New York, but returned to Trenton in 1906, where, with two partners, he opened a grocery that was successful until 1935, during the Depression, when Giant Tiger put it out of business. Louis moved on to the chicken business and later laundromats. Stark, born in 1939, was particularly close to his grandfather..

“My grandfather Lou was basically my father. I was born in 1939, and my father was away because of the war. My grandfather was the person that I related to... We went to Cadwalader Park every Sunday to the monkey house, to see the bears, and to get a balloon from Mendel, the balloon man.”

Stark’s father, Sidney, was an attorney, starting out in business law. “My father’s first case was his father’s bankruptcy,” Stark says. Later he represented people hurt at work. He served on the board of Har Sinai and as its vice president.

His mother, the first of the seven kids in her family to go to college, grew up in New Britain, CT, to attend Ryder College. She started work as a stenographer, worked as Sidney’s secretary for the first years of the Depression, and when her children went to college she became a home economics teacher at Trenton High School.

Growing up, Stark’s friendships in the Irish, Black, Polish, Italian and of Jewish communities, grew out of his neighborhood and his activities at Trenton High School, where he was on the school paper and the debate team, and also played tennis. He was nationally ranked in his senior year in high school and his first year at Dartmouth College, where he majored in government and economics.

Stark wanted to become a lawyer, not to follow in his father’s footsteps, but because he was always interested “in Trenton’s demise” and wanted “to change city planning.” His senior thesis at Dartmouth looked at how five cities, including Trenton, “balanced the need for change versus the resistance to change.” While Stark was in college, in the late 1950s, his family moved from West Trenton to Lawrenceville.

At the University of Pennsylvania law school Stark took a joint course in urban development and law. Upon graduation, he received a fellowship with the Ford Foundation to study decision-making by political leaders. Although assigned to work with Colorado governor John Love on water resource planning, at the literal last minute he was sent to New Jersey because, he was told, “Governor [Richard J.] Hughes... needs somebody like you.”

For the governor Stark drafted the legislation to set up the Community Affairs Department and the Housing and Finance Agency.

He then joined the City Attorneys office of Trenton mayor Arthur Holland, where he worked with Ronald Berman and Leonard Etz to redo the ordinances for urban development in Trenton. Stark then formed the first moderate income housing corporation in New Jersey, at Mercer Street Friends Center, which led to three large developments—Kingsbury, Trent Center West, and Luther Towers—but funding was cut off for that type of housing during the Reagan years, Stark says He also worked with city planner and developer Alvin Gershen as lawyer for his projects.

In 1966, Stark married his wife, Ellen, and in 1967, their son, Jared, was born; their daughter Rachel arrived two years later. Stark became disillusioned with government after seeing “cops beat up people” in 1968 and made a career change.

After gaining some trial experience, Stark started representing people with neural injuries and is particularly proud that some of his lawsuits changed products to improve safety, for example, side airbags and protective covers for forklifts.

Stark is currently president emeritus of the board of directors for National Junior Tennis and Learning of Trenton, which he describes as “an inner-city learning program that serves up dreams by helping young, under-resourced kids to learn not only tennis but also their schoolwork.”

Stark has three grandchildren who live on Maple Street in Princeton.

The Greater Trenton Jewish Cemetery Project not only revitalized these old cemeteries, but also created new connections, both of individual families with their own histories and among members of the former Trenton Jewish community.

People who had “never visited these cemeteries because they were overrun,” Stark explains, were able to easily locate and their families’ graves due to the cemetery project’s inventory of the orphan cemeteries.

But the project’s influence has reached farther than visits to family graves.

“The cemetery project has in my opinion become a vehicle for people to ask questions,” says Stark, “and with the internet and genealogy and technology, people have been reaching back.”

As people learn more about their ancestors, they share their stories, which leads to new connections.

“Families have been talking amongst each other and to people they have lost contact with or never knew they were related to, which was an unintended consequence.”