Not all of New Orleans' cemeteries are "cities of the dead"

On New Orleans' Jewish cemeteries.

Hebrew Rest Cemetery

I drive down Elysian Fields every day on the way to school. Mostly I do it to avoid offroading Franklin, a street that’ll pop your tires and dislodge your dental fillings in one go. This week I noticed something new, something I’d never seen in New Orleans —  standard headstones, of the sort I’m accustomed to seeing in cities with deeper water tables.

Once I saw the Hebrew inscriptions on the headstones — ah! — I got it. As The Cultural Landscape Foundation writes about Gates of Prayer Cemetery on Canal Street:

While a section of the cemetery is dedicated to in-ground burials marked by simple marble slabs, most of the graves are made of marble-frame raised beds filled with soil, satisfying Jewish tradition that the deceased be buried in the ground, while responding to New Orleans’ high water table. Some tombs are accentuated with ornate memorial architecture reminiscent of the city’s Catholic cemeteries, but in keeping with Jewish tradition, all the graves face east toward Jerusalem.

The cemeteries running along Elysian include the five-block Hebrew Rest, Agudath Anshe Sfard Cemetary, and New Beth Israel. They’re concentrated here because the water table is slightly lower, allowing bodies to be buried in the ground.

In a funny coincidence, I noticed those headstones late Thursday afternoon, roughly 24 hours before the start of Rosh Hashanah. As reformjudaism.com notes: “Many Jews make a point of visiting loved ones’ graves during the Hebrew month of Elul just prior to the onset of the High Holidays, on the day before Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. During this season, some congregations hold communal memorial services (sometimes called Kever Avot or ‘ancestors’ graves’)”

New Beth Israel Cemetery

Maybe the cemeteries were just glowing with more energy than usual? (More likely, I need to sharpen my observational skills.) I stopped and briefly walked through New Beth Israel and Hebrew Rest No. 1, two very different cemeteries. New Beth Israel, which opened in 1990, is very simple and elegant, with Art Deco-inpired gates, a wooden gazebo, and modern headstones lovingly covered in visitation stones.

New Beth Israel Cemetery

Hebrew Rest feels a bit more like New Orleans’ “cities of the dead,” because of the historic markers. But as the Cultural Landscape Foundation writes:

Located along the Gentilly Ridge, a topographic remnant of a historic distributary of the Mississippi River, Hebrew Rest takes advantage of the rare high ground in a bowl-shaped city. The cemetery comprises three distinct sections, each occupying a city block on flat ground. The oldest section, Hebrew Rest No. 1, was founded in 1860.  Hebrew Rest No. 2 was established in 1894, and No. 3 in 1938. Together, the three sections comprise the largest Jewish cemetery in New Orleans.

Hebrew Rest Cemetery

Though Jewish Law forbids disinterrment, the city razed Gates of Mercy, Louisiana’s first Jewish cemetery, to make way for a playground in 1957. There’s a historical marker where it once stood on Rampart; the graves were moved to Hebrew Rest.

Though this city makes grievous errors sometimes in its care for the dead — see above — as a whole it has a dignified, open-eyed attitude toward death that’s in stark contrast to the rest of the U.S., which tends towards a death-denying culture. Anthropologists and sociologists have linked that to our addiction to plastic surgery, orthorexia, and the weird, hypermedicalized experience we Americans often have at the end of our lives.

In New Orleans, death’s viewed more as a natural and holy part of the human experience. The dead are seen and honored with second line parades, with All Saints Day tomb whitewashings, or in this case, by searching hard for the absolutely correct landscape in which to properly bury the dead.

Wikipedia has a full list of New Orleans’ 42 historic cemeteries and the history of why they are the way they are, including some side trips on J. N. B. de Pouilly’s cemetery architecture, potter’s fields, and different cultures’ influence on the city’s funerary practices.

In the meantime, if you are celebrating High Holy Days: May you have a good and sweet new year.

Housekeeping &c.

Apologies for the late dispatch. I’m still in the throes of my first summer-to-fall cold, which came with the usual annoyances (coughing, sneezing, etc.) as well as weird sparkles in my peripherial vision, dizzyness, and blistering headaches. Which made looking at a screen/typing kind of uncomfortable. But I’m on the mend. (Also, this cold made me feel terrible, but not so terrible that it inspired a post on burial plots.)

Thanks to P.K. for the subscription, and of course thanks to Summer, Maggie, Rene, Cat, Jim, Trent, Scott, Sam, Brian, and all the other lovelies who stop by on the regular to comment on posts. Seeing those is kind of like getting birthday presents every week.

For those who haven’t bopped over to Memory Hall in the last seven days, there’s a spicy anecdote about Southern Decadence, as well as new content at Silver Tray and Artica Ever After.