A Visit To The Secret Cemetery Inside A GM Plant That’s Only Open Six Hours A Year

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 1 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 Grey, 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 20^th century, Jewish merchants and other residents were already in Detroit in the 19^th 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. Grey’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, Grey 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 Grey’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,” Grey 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, Grey 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. Grey, 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