Allan Appel photo
Bogdanoff by one of the Spivack family monuments.
“I used to play baseball with one of the Spivacks,” said Bob Bogdanoff, as he knelt by a tombstone bearing that very same family name. “They owned the cleaners in Westville. And he kept a pint of schnapps under second base. He’d take a shot if he ever got there.”
Then there was Komisar, who owned the furniture store; Chase, an electrician, like Bogdanoff’s grandfather; and Joe Hozen who owned Checkered Flag Autoparts, the only place on Whalley where you could get the right stuff for foreign cars.
No wonder Bogdanoff, president of the Vilner Lodge, a social and burial society, was emotional.
Everyone buried in the 114-year-old Independent Vilner Lodge cemetery — off Whalley Avenue and bounded by Fitch, Onyx, and Jewell streets — seemed to be family or friends or friends of friends across generations.
For want of younger people in the lodge to do the time-consuming and intimate job of maintaining burial grounds and monuments, Bogdanoff, the group’s president, along with his board, have just given title of the cemetery and responsibility for maintenance to the Jewish Cemetery Association of Greater New Haven.
The association took title of the Vilner plot on Aug. 4.
The lodge — a burial, social, and self-help group organized by families originally from the Vilna area in Lithuania, and known as landsmannschaften in Yiddish — still continues as a social club, albeit with dwindling numbers.
Click here for an article for how the lodge marked its 100th year, in 2011.
Yet in its heyday, the lodge had hundreds of active, dues-paying members, and its community-focused events were a hot ticket — picnics, dances, breakfasts, parties, and a recitation of the names of the dead on the grounds of the cemetery during High Holidays, which still goes on today.
Although it was, and is, at heart a burial society, the scope and reach of its activities and networking helped anchor and assimilate early 20th century Jewish New Haveners, as they made their way in the Elm City and America.
When Bogdanoff recently turned over title of the Vilner Lodge cemetery, it became the most recent of what are now 14 separate Jewish burial grounds at that location (plus a number in East Haven) that the Jewish Cemetery Association of Greater New Haven now owns and cares for.
Across Onyx Street there are two other burial grounds belonging to an earlier, 19th-century generation of Jewish New Haveners associated with synagogues Bnai Jacob and Mishkan Israel who themselves take care of their grounds
But the crowded, shared necropolis to the north and west, with tombstones nearly shoulder-to-shoulder across six acres, belonged to now long gone other societies, associations, and defunct synagogues — Warshower Relief Society, Adas Israel Synagogue, Mt. Sinai …
As younger generations moved away from town, it was the neglected condition of some of these sites that, back in 2004, caught the attention of Bob Goodman, Lester Margolis, and Stephen Saltzman. The three established the Jewish Cemetery Association of Greater New Haven, which is now under the umbrella of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven
Association Executive Director Andrew Hodes said that all told, in the Greater New Haven area, there are 27 Jewish burial grounds, and the association manages and coordinates the care of all of them all through a shared maintenance program.
“We came into being,” said Hodes, “because of the disrepair of some of the cemeteries.”
Over time, added the group’s president Andy Weinstein — a businessman who understands economies of scale — it also became clear that it made no sense for each of the 27 to have its own individual groundskeeper arrangements.
“So we have title to 14, but all 27 fall under our shared maintenance plan,” he added.
And that involves a lot more than just mowing the lawns — which, by the way, are watered only by the rains, said Hodes.
Apparently the founders’ confidence in the Almighty (“Blessed art Thou oh Lord our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth the dew and the rain”) appears to have been such that all these talented Jewish plumbers, electricians, builders, and tradesmen somehow forgot to put in the location any water source or sprinkling system.
On a sweltering recent afternoon, Bogdanoff, Hodes, and Weinstein toured this reporter around examples of what loving maintenance and management consist of: Fielding phone calls from relatives from all over the world looking for a loved one’s grave; phone calls from genealogists; re-setting stones that have toppled from tree limbs hitting them (that’s why no trees are allowed on the grounds), or re-erecting stones that are knocked over and damaged due to ice flow or vandalism; removing, with ammoniated compounds, the grime covering lettering and inscriptions; digging out vines, plants and bushes that grow up around the stones because their roots undermine how the stones are set in the ground.
And while the by-laws say that the family is ultimately responsible for the individual grave stones, when no family is around, the job more frequently than not falls to the association.
In addition, there is year-round repairing of the concrete and other walkways so that trip hazards are eliminated, for after all, many of the visitors to a burial ground are the elderly themselves; tending to the steel and other fencing around the site where a car accident two years ago resulted in a large section of the steel fence on Onyx Street being bent out of shape; reinforcing the system of retaining walls, which often involves temporarily removing many rows of tombstones.
And then there are the usual irritations of urban life, whose offense is exacerbated because of the setting: fielding calls from neighbors as well as family members of the dead complaining of continual midnight dumping of bags of trash, furniture, and mattresses near the cemetery entryways; illegal long-term parking, often of large trucks, all of which the city is slow in attending to, and which cumulatively disrespect the site.
Many of these tasks, such as concrete repair and large limb lifting, said Hodes, are additionally complicated and require loving and understanding subcontractors because the pathways are narrow and uneven, the old-fashioned gate openings to the properties are small and big forklifts and other heavy equipment cannot be brought in.
And there’s more immediate and serious stuff as well.
For example, Weinstein reported that at one of the cemeteries some 30 stones were knocked down several years ago in an act of vandalism, and there is always graffiti removal as well.
All told, he estimated the nearly all-volunteer staff who oversee this work must raise about $100,000 a year to get the tasks coordinated and done. Hodes said the mid and long-term goal is to raise an endowment of $3 million, whose proceeds, at least at today’s prices, would secure ongoing funding for the maintenance.
“When there is no one able to manage them, when the founders have gone defunct, it’s our responsibility,” said Hodes, “to maintain a respectful resting place for our loved ones.”
Or, as Bogdanoff put it more simply: “It’s strange how you walk into a cemetery and you know everyone there. The people I grew up with. This was the Jewish community in New Haven then. This is family. You don’t want anything to go astray.”
For those interested in learning more or contributing to the effort, the contact is Executive Director Andrew Hodes: (203) 387‑2424 x303, ahodes@jewishnewhaven.org
Bogdanoff himself has repaired the rusted gate hinge.
A car plowed into the steel fence two years ago.
Because of the damage they cause, no bushes or trees are permitted on the grounds
Tree-trunk style stone -- because Harold Waxman died yet a child, age 13, in 1926. Bogdanoff and his son righted stone when it fell, and have made it their own
A cemetery map included in the Aug. 4 deed transferring ownership of the Vilner plot.