My map is marked “German Corner” near the cemetery. There’s a Venezuelan restaurant across from an auto body shop and the Lebanese Cultural Union. We live in a city of change, but down the road, you’ll find a German-speaking retirement home and the Grove Street Cemetery.

 

It was violence that drew me to these unexpected memorials and why I chose to share them. The beauty after violence intrigued the modernist in me, and the process of creation spoke to my intellect.

A Brief History

Ceramic memorials are not popular in American cemeteries, though common in pockets of Italy and Eastern Europe. When they occur in large groupings here, they are almost always an indicator that what is being memorialized is a community of immigrants.

The Grove Street Memorials make up a small percentage of the total monuments at the cemetery, occurring only in a few congregations and groupings dating from approximately 1920 to 1945.

 

The majority of Boston’s Jewish immigration was primarily Orthodox and Eastern European. By 1920, the community had split geographically, with earlier, assimilating “German Jews” moving toward Brookline, and the more recently arrived “Russian” Jews moving from the South End slums toward Roxbury. While anti-Semitism would have been the norm in Boston at the time, many second and third generation Jewish families were finding cultural and economic opportunity in Boston. The Grove Street Memorials reflect this integration and growing wealth.

 

They might also be said to turn away from Leviticus 26:1, Do not raise up a stone idol or a sacred pillar for yourselves, and the Halakha, or Jewish Law, with its prohibition on images of people. While different commentators and rabbis might debate the fine points of art and when representation is within the law, it’s fairly clear that placing an image, with its direct full faced-appeal, even as remembrance (or perhaps specifically because of remembrance), would be an affront to the Law as detailed in the Shulkhan Aruchkh. It is no surprise that these memorials appear so infrequently in an overwhelming Orthodox community.

 

Some of these memorials have faded, some have cracked as ice froze behind them. Many are intact. And there are those that have been vandalized, erasing the past and breaking the silent stare of the dead. It’s as if they’ve been removed from our community and there is no other way to describe this but a brutal rupture between the living and our sanctity. May his soul be bound...

As a society, we are inured to violence. It surrounds us in our movies, our music, our games, and in the luridness of “infotainment.” The realness of violence and its pervasiveness, though, are as shrouded as death itself.

Whether one is Jewish or not, it is impossible not to read into these vandalized memorials, particularly when seen as a group, the horror of the Jewish experience in the twentieth century. One can see beyond them into the Holocaust, and before them into the reasons families were fleeing to Boston at the turn of the century.

These are, at their center, personal and local markers of devotion. The hands that desecrated them were local as well, though we don’t know when or with what intent. It is that stillness broken by maliciousness that is their greatest testament.

The camera focuses on what it is there. The epoxies oxidizing, fragments of porcelain, finger marks smoothing the plaster, lichens growing as if on mountainsides of granite. The heart— it must focus beyond, to the sadness of yet another disappearance.