'They graced us with their presence.' Mount Hope Cemetery gets Holocaust monument
Rochester's Mount Hope Cemetery this month became perhaps the only municipal cemetery in the United States to feature a Holocaust memorial, a tribute to the 110 or so Holocaust survivors buried there.
Among those survivors is Jacqueline Eissenstat, a French Jew who survived Nazi occupation because a sympathetic woman sheltered her family in a farmhouse and helped them pass as Christian. She moved to the United States in 1957 and died in Rochester in 1999.
Another stone marks the burial place of Erla Bornstein and serves as a cenotaph for her husband, who died in the Warsaw ghetto, and two of her children, who were taken by the Nazis and killed in the gas chamber at Auschwitz in 1942.
A third is for Elli Wurzburger Gupp, who spent the early 1940s in a French work camp separated from her parents, who died at Auschwitz. After the war she wrote to a distant cousin who was a member of Temple B'rith Kodesh in Rochester. That cousin arranged for her immigration, and she became a nurse and lived here until she died of cancer in 1975.
"We hope that people who see and reflect on this monument will be reminded that before Holocaust survivors were called survivors, before they were victims, they were just human beings trying to live normal lives whose only crime was being Jewish," Michael Dobkowski, chair of Holocaust Studies at Hobart and William Smith, said in his remarks at the dedication ceremony. "We as a community, the city of Rochester, are privileged that they graced us with their presence. We are so much richer for it."
For a public cemetery, Mount Hope has an unusually rich Jewish history. Temple B'rith Kodesh purchased a plot there in 1848, just 10 years after the cemetery opened, said Marcia Birken, a co-chair of the Friends of Mount Hope Holocaust committee.
It was in 2021, during restoration work on that original Jewish section, that the idea of a Holocaust memorial and research project first arose. By cross-referencing cemetery records with rolls of Holocaust survivors, the committee was able to count more than 110 survivors buried at Mount Hope.
By comparison, Britton Road Cemetery, the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Rochester area, has 120 survivors, Birken said.
The committee raised $24,000 for the monument itself, which was created by local sculptor William Yager and bears a quotation from Elie Wiesel. They also raised an additional $10,000 for educational programming.
The monument is located on Adlington Avenue near Oak Avenue in front of the Temple B’rith Kodesh section in Range 7 of the cemetery.
As part of the inventory, the committee conducted interviews with many survivors' descendants. Some of those descendants were present May 7 for the ceremonial unveiling.
"They were just crying," Birken said. "They were so overwhelmed with knowing their families were going to be remembered and have their stories told for future generations."
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Mount Hope Cemetery gets Holocaust memorial monument
