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CBI'S
HISTORY OF JEWISH BURIAL SPACE
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By Stuart Simmons Executive Director
I am writing about
our Congregation's
long tradition of
providing Jewish
burial space in San
Diego. Within our
congregational
structure there is a
second independent
corporation known
as the Cemetery & Mausoleum
Association. It has its own board of
directors and it is responsible for
providing consecrated Jewish burial
space to members and our extended
families.
The C & M Association was
incorporated in 1955 for the purpose
of buying and re-selling Jewish burial
space to CBI members. It began its
sacred duties first with the purchase
and
re-selling of consecrated Jewish, aboveground
crypts and niches at the
Cypress View Mausoleum.
More recently, the Association
purchased and re-sold in-ground plots
at the El Camino Memorial Park in
Sorrento Valley, first in a lawn that was
established in 1992 and now in a
second lawn acquired in 1998. The
lawns are known as the Mt. of Olives I
& II. Sadly the first lawn has filled and
is a final resting place for many of our
loved ones.
I want to share a bit of our
Congregation's history with regard to
helping members cope with end of life
issues. It pre-dates the origins of
today's C & M Association by many
years. For this information I turned to
our archivist and friend Stan Schwartz
of the Jewish Historical Society for
help, and I thank Stan for his
contribution to this article.
At Beth Israel, we are directly
connected to San Diego's first Jewish
congregation that was originally known
as Adath Yeshurun, and our mutual
roots go back to 1861. As far back as
then, and long before the C & M
Association, the few Jews in the
community recognized there was a
primary need for a Jewish cemetery. In
1862, Louis Rose, San Diego's first Jewish resident, donated five acres of
land on Point Loma for use as a sacred
burial ground. That land was located in
what is now the Midway-Rosecrans
area, near where Sharp-Cabrillo Hospital
is today. It remained a Jewish cemetery
for thirty years, until 1892.
In 1892, a new cemetery was
established in southeast San Diego
called Mt. Hope, with a Jewish section
that came to be known as Home of
Peace Cemetery. The non-Jewish and
Jewish sections were separated by a
gully that today is the right-of-way for
one of the MTA's trolley routes. In
1939, the remains of those interred in
the original Point Loma cemetery were
re-interred in the Home of Peace
Cemetery.
The land, which Rose
originally deeded to the Jews of the
Adath Yeshurun Congregation, became
property of Congregation Beth Israel
without a change of ownership. The
congregation, through
its cemetery
association, sold the
land to Doctor's
Hospital, now Sharp-Cabrillo, and the
money was used to
purchase a Jewish
section of new aboveground
burial crypts at
the Cypress View
Mausoleum that was
named the Home of
Peace Corridors.
Congregation Beth
Israel was primarily
responsible for the
administration of the cemetery in its
earliest days and later began to share
these responsibilities on a corporate
board with two other congregations
(Tifereth Israel and Beth Jacob). In
1967 the bylaws were revised to add
three more congregations to the board,
the first Temple Solel (which eventually
merged with CBI), Temple Beth
Sholom and Congregation Beth Tefilah
(now merged with Ohr Shalom
Synagogue).
Home of Peace Cemetery is a very
interesting final resting place. It holds
the remains of most of the Jewish
pioneers who died in San Diego and is
part of our history. Other early San
Diegans are interred in the crypts in
the Jewish section at Cypress View
Mausoleum. Both the cemetery and the mausoleum are located on Imperial
Avenue, a short drive from downtown
San Diego and they continue to operate
today, providing burial space to the
Jewish community. The burial plots in
the Mt. of Olives lawns at El Camino
and the crypts and niches in the
Jewish section of Cypress View, remain
under the administrative auspices of
our C & M Association. While our
Congregation retains a seat on the
Home of Peace corporate board, Am
Israel Mortuary handles its day-to-day
administration.
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