Home of Peace: A Bridge Between Past and Future By Glenn Hammel
Judaism considers each life journey to be sacred. When our life ends, our individual journey is interred with our body into sacred ground. The Jewish belief in the eternity of the soul demands we demonstrate proper respect for the bodies of the dead. Once within this soil, our bodies are meant to be kept undisturbed for perpetuity. Most people only walk through Home of Peace, the Sacramento region's Jewish community cemetery, when they are there for a lifecycle event burdened by the weight of loss. Few ever visit Home of Peace to reflect on its role in the wider context of the Jewish community’s past, let alone upon our future. Understandably, many would regard a tour of the grounds being only about the literally dead past. However, as Faulkner reminds us: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The bucolic grounds at Home of Peace offer its visitors many differing experiences. Some visitors come to reflect on the lives that came before them and find a comforting meditative stillness in the gentle, quiet, park-like landscaping. Others find the physical environment at Home of Peace brings an anxiety-provoking stiltedness, an absence of the vitality that denotes life. But whatever the experience, it is the past that pulls our attentions most powerfully. And so, the natural inclination is to view Home of Peace as a place where the dead are honored, but not one where the living come together to create a vision of shared future and put it into action. Those entrusted to maintain Home of Peace, its Board of Trustees, do not see our labors as limited to merely serving as guardians of the past. We also know that by sustaining the Sacramento Jewish community’s most central point of coming together, we act as a catalyst, ensuring its continuity. Our Jewish community is composed of different denominations, different congregations, and different understandings of how to balance personal autonomy with rabbinic authority. Our community members often hold different visions as to the problems that face us and as to what it takes to live a meaningful Jewish life. This heterogeneity blesses us with a wonderful communal vibrancy. There is no greater place in Sacramento for harmonizing the passions and tensions of this dynamism than Home of Peace. Here we come together to work in common purpose to meet the demands set by Jewish law and values. Here we recognize that our past, present, and future are always dependent on each other. And here we find our common home. The cemetery's literal name is, “Home of Peace.” Home of Peace is, in fact, our "home." Death ends a life but not a relationship. The most important information inscribed on a head stone is not the dates of an individual’s birth and of passing. Rather, it is the descriptive terms of their relationships with others: with their family, community, and even the far-flung lands from which they emigrated. Along the rows at Home of Peace, and words like “Beloved Mother," "Loving Father," “Healer,” and "Born in Bavaria," are everywhere. Home of Peace Cemetery has been preserving relationships since the first Sacramento Jew, Mr. Morris Goldstein, was buried here in 1849. Mr. Goldstein was the business partner of Mr. Moses Haim, the founder of the Sacramento Jewish community. They had come to the Gold-Rush region just as so many others did during that time, to make their personal fortunes. Moses Haim was the driving force behind fulfilling one the primary priorities for any new Jewish community: establishing a Jewish cemetery. Moses Haim held a belief that has never dimmed within our Jewish community: that we are all responsible for one another. And so we preserve this sacred space. Many living descendants of those who have been buried here the longest may have lost their familial connection to their personal past. However, as a Jewish community we have never forgotten our connection to the shared foundations of our communal past. Our grounds include monuments recognizing communal catastrophes, big and small, that define our relationships with each other. Ashes from the crematorium at the Auschwitz death camp are buried here, as are charred remains of books destroyed by an anti-Semitic arson attack on Congregation B'nai Israel in 1998. Home of Peace helps us to remember these events, lest we forget the task of ensuring they don’t happen again. These are perilous times for American Jewish cemeteries. Nationally, we are confronting a wave of targeted anti-Semitic vandalism and must cope with toppled and damaged tombstones, and the harsh financial burden of installing adequate security systems. Our cemeteries aren’t being targeted because they represent our past. They are being targeted because they represent our present and our future. Home of Peace's continuing story reflects the evolution of Sacramento's Jewish community. Traditional Jewish burial practices contend with the flux and flow of our changing demographics, our evolving aesthetics, the requirements of California law, and the customs of distant lands from which our families emigrated. The press of these dynamic forces shapes how we come to know ourselves as Jews. Home of Peace exists to help the Sacramento Jewish community navigate the broader sweep of our collective Jewish history. Home of Peace contains this community’s memories, both the shared and the personal. Our memories make us who we are. A walk through Home of Peace brings the blessing of a deepened understanding of how our past and our future dance together.

6200 Stockton Blvd

Sacramento

California 95824

 

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