Remote Remembrance

Jewish tradition teaches us to remember the dead, link ancestors with succeeding generations, l’dor v’dor, and create community. One traditional way to commemorate deceased loved ones is to visit their graves on the anniversaries of their deaths (yahrzeit) and during the High Holidays.

Today, however, this command is not always easy to follow. Many modern Jews are mobile, and family gravesites may be far away. The Santa Fe Jewish Cemetery offers an accessible and creative solution to this problem. The cemetery houses a large and growing number of “legacy plaques” that enable Jews in Santa Fe to remember their loved ones at their hometown cemetery, where they have become the focus of innovative rituals of memory. The Legacy Plaque Project provides cemetery-based memorialization of people buried in other cemeteries, availability to members of all Jewish traditions, as well as the unaffiliated, and charity through donations of plaques to a Jewish institution: the cemetery.

In 1996, representatives of Temple Beth Shalom and Congregation Beit Tikva established a dedicated Jewish section of the privately owned burial ground now known as Rivera Memorial Gardens. An Orthodox area was soon added, and today the Jewish section is shared by all five congregations in Santa Fe: Temple Beth Shalom (Reform), Congregation Beit Tikva (Reform-leaning), HaMakom (Renewal/Conservative), Santa Fe Jewish Center (Chabad), and Kol BaRemah (Orthodox). The Jewish Community Council of Northern New Mexico sold the graves. A beautiful corner stone wall was erected by the Gould family to honor their loved one, which greatly enhanced the site.

By 2013, when the Jewish section was almost full, Tim Rivera, the new cemetery owner, agreed to enlarge it and to extend the stone wall to border the expanded area. A committee created the Legacy Memorial Plaque Project in 2014 as a fundraising strategy to pay for the wall extension. It comprised Rabbi Berel Levertov (Chabad Jewish Center), Rabbi Malka Drucker (HaMakom), Richard Martinez (Martinez Architecture Studio), John Morris (New Mexico Stone), and community members Jane Hochberg, Gay Block, and Doris Francis (chair).

Francis, an anthropologist, spearheaded the Legacy Plaque Project. In 2005, she had published the book The Secret Cemetery, reissued in 2021 by Routledge, about how different religious groups use London cemeteries as sites of memory and memorialization. In her ongoing research on cemetery rituals, Francis interviewed 35 people who purchased plaques during the first five years of the Santa Fe project.

In conceiving the project, the committee drew on an established Jewish tradition of memorial plaques, which are customarily mounted on synagogue walls. In Santa Fe, this practice was expanded to include an evolving interpretation of bimkom kever, which means “in place of the grave,” in which close relatives and friends who are not buried in Santa Fe can be memorialized. Levertov commended the project for honoring Jewish burial and for beautifying the cemetery. He has no halachic concerns about the project.

Plaques are made from locally sourced stone and engraved by a local craftsman. They measure about 10” by 5” by 2.5”, and cost $613, of which $400 is a tax-deductible contribution to finance the wall. Plaques are equal in size and mounted next to each other in the order in which they were commissioned. The design was inspired by the Borneplatz Memorial Site Frankfurt, in Germany, where 11,908 blocks on the outside wall of the Jewish cemetery memorialize the Frankfurt Holocaust victims.

The Santa Fe community enthusiastically adopted the Legacy Plaque Project from its inception. Funds from the sale of the first 90 plaques raised $36,000 to help build two separate extensions of the wall—108 feet in 2014 and an additional 99 feet in 2019-20—and to construct a circular seating area that overlooks the site and encourages contemplation. Private donations and grants from the New Mexico Jewish Community Foundation have provided supplemental funding.

Although plaques are purchased in remembrance of children, siblings, and spouses, the majority memorialize parents, to “honor thy father and mother.” Richard Lieberman donated a plaque for his parents, who are buried in Tucson, Arizona. “The plaque lets me connect with my parents and honor them locally, to show honor to the past, to my parents, and to stay connected to family,” he told Francis when she interviewed him as part of her research.

There is room for a few small stones atop each plaque; following Jewish memorial ritual, visitors place a small stone on a person’s plaque to mark their visit and to leave something of themselves behind. Many visitors engage with the physicality of the stone, touch the plaque, place their hands on the top or sides, run their fingers over the letters. Such innovative plaque rituals allow a materially and spiritually engaged connection across the generations.

Some people visit their plaques on Remembrance Day, a commemorative event held annually since 2014 during the weeks of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Rabbis from all Jewish traditions in Santa Fe participate. Psalms are read, newly added plaques are unveiled—in September 2023, six plaques were unveiled, bringing the total to 98—and their sponsors are invited to speak about the remembered individuals. Plaque donor Gail Rapoport told Francis, “The wall is like a family tree with the history of Jewish life in Santa Fe.”

“We are in the open space of the cemetery, seated facing the wall with its commemorative plaques. To me, its beauty and aesthetics are powerful, overwhelming,” noted Rabbi Martin Levy of Congregation Beit Tikva. “It is like the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the same color and radiance … It has resonance for all: for generations past and what we are looking forward to in each new generation.”

At Remembrance Day 2023, Margo Taylor unveiled a plaque for her husband Harvey’s parents, Abraham and Lillian, whose graves are in Los Angeles. Margo and Harvey learned of the plaques from Francis, who presented a paper about the project at a New Mexico Jewish Historical Society conference before Harvey passed away in May 2023. Margo often visits his grave—and his parents’ plaque—at the Jewish cemetery.

The stone walls bearing memorial plaques speak to the persistence of a Jewish community whose citizens continue to follow the ethical principles of Judaism: to remember their dead, serve their community, and transmit family history and memory to future generations. Rivera Memorial Gardens’ owner has called the present-day Jewish section the “spiritual center of the cemetery.” New plaques add new members to the Santa Fe’s Jewish community, bringing to it the memories of people from many other locations and from generations past.

“Jewish legacy means memory—the extension of life,” plaque donor Erika Rimson told Francis. “It is important to know who your ancestors are and their personal history and where they came from and to pass this on to one’s children.”