Beth Jacob Cemetery, Morton Grove/Niles
Posted by:
craig16
(---.dsl.emhril.sbcglobal.net)
Date: June 08, 2008 07:21PM
Anyone know the legal status of the old, abandoned Jewish cemetery near the intersection of Waukegan and Shermer?
Growing up in Niles in the '70s, my friends and I used to play in the "old cemetery." There were overturned headstones among the overgrown weeds and empty beer cans. The inscriptions were mostly in Hebrew, but some of the death dates were pre-1900 if I recall. Many tombstones were broken and a few had swastikas scrawled on them (nice to see, especially for us Jewish kids). I know the area had been cleaned up and the headstones re-erected within the newly-named "Shermer Park" in the '90s, but now the entire area, while mowed and maintained, is fenced off with a big locked gate on the Niles side and no point of entry on the Morton Grove side. A way to at least view the cemetery is from the parking lot of Lavitt Animal Hospital at 8450 Waukegan Rd., Morton Grove. The thing is, there might be bodies still buried there. Not much on the web about it, except this entry from jewishgen.org in 1998:
* Beth Jacob: also called Keheleth Jacob Anshe Drohiczen. {10835} Names were listed on web 5/98 as they wish to remove the bodies and build something on the grounds. Local children (?) wrecked the cemetery. Some of the headstones have since been moved to a newly constructed fenced-in area for protection. The bodies are still out in an empty field. At the current time, a developer picked up the property on a tax sale (On the death of the president of the cemetery association, nobody filed for a tax exemption so it went back on the tax role). Source: Jewel Fishkin; e-mail: xjewelx@webtv.net
Since discovering historicaerials.com, I compared the empty field north of the current 8450 Waukegan Rd. entry with the 1938 view. The cemetery (which appears to be the only thing around these parts back then) seems to have been subsequently built over by houses and apartments while the entry path off Waukegan Rd. is where the headstones must have been displaced (bulldozed?) and where the empty field now stands. If the bodies were never reinterred, they must be under these residences, no?