Typically, when you pay your respects at a cemetery, you go through the gates and enter the peaceful surroundings. There might be birds chirping, and wreaths or flowers decorating the graves.
To visit Beth Olem Cemetery, you must first stop at a guard station behind a traffic barrier. You’re asked to wait for a security vehicle, Then, you travel deep into the grounds of a General Motors assembly plant. Rather than the sounds of nature, you hear freight trains and semi-trailers passing by. The décor is limited to smooth pebbles atop the gravestones, a Jewish tradition to honor the dead.
Beth Olem sits behind brick and concrete walls only steps from GM’s Factory ZERO, its first dedicated electric vehicle plant. Its home is the sprawling Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center, known locally as Poletown, for the immigrant neighborhood it displaced when GM opened its original plant here in 1985.
This Jewish cemetery was in place long before the factory, however. In fact, it pre-dates GM itself by nearly half a century. But due to its location, GM only opens the burial ground twice a year, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the Sunday before Passover in the spring and the Sunday before Rosh Hashanah in the fall.
The Cemetery Beyond The Gates
This past Sunday, Jim Gray, a Farmington Hills, Mich. genealogist and guardian of the cemetery’s history, greeted visitors at the gate with a bag full of stones, a sign-in sheet, and numerous tales about those buried in Beth Olem, which he has documented for the past 40 years.
“One year, there were some guys looking for a grave at the far end, not too far from my great-grandparents,” he recalled. “There was a pile of leaves. They got on their hands and knees, and cleared everything away, and dug, and they found it, and brought it back to life.”
Although immigrants from around the world flocked to work in the auto industry during the 20th century, Jewish merchants and other residents were already in Detroit in the 19th century, forming their first synagogue. In 1861, the congregation split in two, with one faction German Reform Jews, the other half Orthodox.
Two members of the Orthodox community purchased a plot of land a few miles north of the Detroit River. They were subsequently joined by other congregations who wanted burial grounds. Eventually, the group accumulated 2.2 acres and built a cemetery with gravestones on either side of a grassy avenue leading from its gates, and a chapel at the end where services could be held.
Like Detroit’s Jewish population, the burials came in waves. The first graves were the original German Jews, buried in the late 1880s. As Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia picked up, more community members were laid to rest. The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919 brought another series of tombstones.
And through all those years were the babies. The southeast corner of the cemetery is home to tiny, heart-wrenching gravestones, some decorated with time-worn figures of cement animals like bunnies and baby lambs.
According to death certificates, some of these babies did not live a full day, succumbing amid their mothers’ difficult labor. Gray’s aunt lived only five days in 1875. “She was born, they knew she had some medical problems, and they let her die,” he says.
A short walk away lay the graves of Deborah Acker-Zolnoski’s relatives, their stones sitting in a row. “I first came here because my sister does a lot of genealogy, and we knew that our great-great-great grandparents, on our mother’s side, were buried here,” she said, shivering in a stiff wind on a 42F degree day. “Since I came here, I found more ancestors.”
Standing next to her family’s headstone, she explains that her great-great-grandmother died at age 36, after giving birth to 10 children. “It’s too much on your body,” Acker-Zolnoski said.
Eventually, 1,100 people were buried in the cemetery, but as the decades went by, Detroit changed dramatically outside its walls. In 1910, the Dodge Brothers opened the sprawling Dodge Main Plant across a nearby rail yard, and parts suppliers began to set up smaller factories in the blocks around the plant.
Squeezed out of their homes by encroaching industry, Detroit’s Jewish community began to move north and west, establishing cemeteries near new neighborhoods. One draw was drier land than the grounds at Beth Olem, which regularly flooded and indeed, were boggy during Sunday’s visiting window. The last person was buried in Beth Olem in 1948.
So, Why Is It Still Here?
Halachic law, which governs Jewish life, prohibits the moving of graves, and Michigan law makes it extraordinarily difficult to do so. Tradition, plus red tape, kept Beth Olem in place.
When Chrysler demolished Dodge Main in 1980, GM subsequently acquired a parcel of land that included its parking lot – and the cemetery. A three-way deal was worked out between the city of Detroit, GM, and Shaary Zedek, one of two suburban synagogues that had oversight of the cemetery.
The city rebuilt the brick wall around three-quarters of the cemetery, which also gained a sturdy concrete retaining wall like those elsewhere in the car complex. GM built an access road from the plant gates to the cemetery, adding a circular parking apron, and Shaarey Zedek took overall responsibility for keeping up the property. The lawn crew from another cemetery, Clover Hill, tends the grass.
By 1982, the chapel fell into disrepair and had to be torn down. In its place, Gray planted a pine tree that now towers over the graves.
Along with the markers for the children, there’s a wide variety of headstones. Some are modest concrete markers flush with the ground, while others have domes held up by pillars, like the monuments in elaborate southern cemeteries. A few are carved stone to resemble tree trunks, symbolizing someone who died young and was unable to grow to their full age.
Many of the graves bear Hebrew characters, while some, like the one for Gray’s great-great grandparents, are in both Hebrew and English. A few graves have been refurbished with gilt letters, but some are too worn to be read.
In recent years, a team of volunteers – “average age around 90,” Gray says – made grave rubbings with paper and paper. “They wrote down everything they could find,” then translated the Hebrew letters into English.
The volunteers posted a file online of those they know are buried here, and cross-referenced them to death certificates, although there may be more due to those grave markers that have sunk into the ground.
Each year, Gray brings a bucket of tools, which can be used to clear grass and moss off the graves. Sometimes, he says, visitors have dug even deeper. “Start with my weed poker, and see if you hit anything hard,” he advised one pair. “They returned with a shovel and found two different families, 20 feet apart. “
Modern genealogy techniques are helping some people locate their ancestors. While it was her first visit to the cemetery, Carrie Nosarchuk-Shepard arrived knowing who she was looking for: her great-great-great-grandmother, Rebecca Goldsmith, who died in 1906; Goldsmith’s son Louis; and another son, Henry, whose own son, Sidney, died at 11 months.
Nosarchuk-Shepard located her relatives on Ancestry.com and looked up the markers on FindAGrave.com. Gray, bag of stones in hand, walked her through the grass to the section where her ancestors were interred.
All Photos By The Author Unless Otherwise Noted
It only takes a few hundred years for people to forget about cemeteries, which is why plenty of places in Europe are built on graves. The Crossrail project in London has dug up over three thousand sets of remains so far.
Hey my car was built there! Not in the cemetery, but still.
Reminds me of Resthaven Cemetary that held up the expansion of O’Hare airport for a while.
The families did not want the graves moved and the city of Chicago wanted them relocated.
The families won, and now the cemetery which was once barely inside the perimeter fence, accessible through a corridor in the fence, is now firmly inside O’Hare airport grounds…. It’s still accessible to the public without security, but it’s walled in with large jet blast walls and you have the constant sounds of jets moving around the tarmac.
There are apparently two gravestones incorporated into one of the runways at Savannah-Hilton Head International Airport. It is a similar situation where family did not want the graves to be relocated.
The headstones are visible on Google Maps. They are on Runway 10/28 about halfway between taxiways A and E1 about 30 feet north of the runway centerline.
It is nice that graves remain undisturbed, but this is a bit extreme.
I used to live in Huntsville, Alabama. There was a small family cemetery in a Home Depot Parking lot there. I don’t think that small family plots are that uncommon anywhere that has been around for more than 100 years or so.
As for child graves, those are so painful to find. The only thing worse is going to a friend’s daughter’s funeral where the casket was not much bigger than a shoebox.
There are a lot of small cemeteries around New England. Every once in a while, you can come across one in the woods.
This reminds me of the grave that is literally in the car park of an auto parts store near my home town.
https://www.oddhistory.com.au/gippsland/the-little-grave/
makes me wonder what itll be like when the Great Walmart Expansion of 2050 happens and we have cemetaries inside our walmarts.
“Welcome to Costco. I love you”.
Lovely article well written, thanks.
Interesting article. I find cemeteries interesting, particularly those in unusual locations.
My favorite is a small cemetery located in the woods between the 17th fairway and the 2nd green of one of my favorite golf courses. It has maybe five headstones, all of which are from the late 19th century. If you are a big hitter and you slice your drive on the 17th, you are likely to land in or near this cemetery. If you are good golfer or left-handed, you probably would have no reason to know it exists. While I wish I were straighter off the tee, it is nice to visit this cemetery most times I play that course. It is great cemeteries like these are preserved even as the land around them changes.
I grew up with a cemetery… in our yard. Yup. My parent’s 14 acre property came with a family cemetery. It has been decades since I last looked at it. But I recall most were from the middle to late 1800’s. One part has a rock wall built around two headstones. Dad recently told me he found out that way back that masons from Italy had come through and built the wall for a few days pay.
My parents located a number of small cemeteries on private land with people we are related to.
We visited most of them in a small town, did some caretaking, and paid for some repairs and upkeep.
There are a lot of small (like 20’x20′) cemeteries in my area, some in yards others on farms most close to the road. There’s a large conservation area near my house I mountain bike in and it has half a dozen, varying from well kept to almost unrecognizable. It seems strage there are so many small ones in my area vs. where I grew up (also rural) which only has a handful of relatively large ones.
As it came with the house, I suppose they were technically your parent’s ancestors, not by descent, but they bought them with the rest of the property
A graveyard both for some small family and your PGA tour dreams.
In my defense, it takes about a 300 yard drive to reach the graveyard. I would feel much worse if it were 40 yards right of the forward tees.
I love old graveyards I find along back roads. Spent quite a pleasant morning vying with my gf in one to see who could find the oldest grave. And, as she had picked wildflowers at an overlook, we put some on well-tended graves in hopes someone would see them—and more on overgrown ones because no one would.
There are several along the backroads of Indiana, some more well-kept than others. It’s always interesting to come across them.
If you ever go to the Great Smoky Mountains NP, there are several within the park, including the tiny Ownby Cemetary. It’s towards the beginning of one of our favorite hikes, Porter’s Creek, up on a little plateau above the gravel road. Just past it are some rusty old car frames in the woods. It’s a beautiful little place.
I used to stop at the little satellite VDOT stations and ask if they had any county maps left. There were old roads & cemeteries all over them, and I used to spend the occasion weekend getting hopelessly, gloriously lost trying out dotted routes. Found a lot of brambles & bees & poison ivy, but also the occasional pointed Confederate headstone hidden in a pleasant grove
Nice write-up. I’ve heard about that cemetery before my understanding it was a sore subject for some. The early years of Detroit are so interesting a lot of history most people know nothing about. It’s amazing how many cemeteries you can find in very strange places as things grew up around them. One of my families cemeteries is in a mall parking lot strange feeling for sure.
Cool article. I love cemeteries, particularly older ones. There’s something comforting about the elemental human need to memorialize our loved ones who’ve passed on to the other side. It’s good to know that even though no one left alive after a couple of generations will remember you, there will be something that anyone can see that recognizes your time here. Thank goodness for laws that prevent a company from just paving over such a site. I have no reason to believe GM would have not acted responsibly in preserving this cemetery if such laws weren’t in place, but still.
The Guinness Brewery in Baltimore has cemetery on the grounds just beyond the fence in the corner opposite the entrance. To my knowledge it is not open to the public. Always found that interesting but apparently it is somewhat common, at least someone is able to care for the dearly departed.
Wow, this hits home. I visit all my family graves every year before Rosh Hashana and I couldn’t imagine how stressful it would be if I had to work around restrictions from a GM plant just to get to them. It’s a shame the couldn’t section off a pathway directly to the cemetery that didn’t need to be gated off.
I have a lot of family going back almost as far in cemeteries in Richmond, VA, and at least one of them has a loud train going by all the time. Economics are sadly always on display when it comes to how ornate tombstones used to be. Older graves are fascinating as the Hebrew often would detail more than just the name and date of death, but also some attributes about their lives. Today this has become prohibitively expensive for most people to do.
I can read Hebrew just enough to understand what’s on most of these stones – it’s a nearly lost tradition to include phrases like “He chased after peace and pursued kindness.”
Would definitely be interested in learning more about how the Orthodox Jewish community dealt with the demands of working in the auto industry back then. Could not have been easy for them to balance the hours and still keep Shabbos.
A number of very old Jewish cemeteries are being restored in California, including headstone repair, water sources and fencing.
Wow, thanks for posting about this! What a strange journey for this poignant place.
Jewish headstones are often double sided, with English on the front and Hebrew on the back, reflecting the common practice of having an English first name for general use and a Hebrew name for religious use.
A Jewish cemetery in Portland has a stone in the children’s section from 1908 that says “killed by an automobile”, the earliest mention I’ve seen of being hit by a car.
I highly recommend that everyone get into Ancestry.com and research your family tree. Well worth the time, and it doesn’t cost much if you unsubscribe once you’re finished.
If you do the DNA test, just be prepared for what it reveals. The web is full of surprise stories after people got their DNA relative results back.
And yeah, infant (and maternal) mortality was a big thing in the nineteenth century. I’ve seen so many of those in my years of tree-building.
Peripheral people I know found lots of half-siblings, shock changes in paternity, and whole new heritage. I have no interest not because I already know enough about my screwed up family to want to find out more, but because the results mainly reflect modern population distributions, which don’t necessarily reflect historic ones, plus privacy concerns. Even if they claim they don’t share the info, when they go bankrupt, who’s holding whoever buys up the assets to those agreements?