History on a Side Street
Cemetery and chapel, silent reminders of East Boston’s Jewish past, on course for renovation
By Jim Correale
Originally published at EastieJolt.com in September, 2009.
In the spring of 1844 members of Boston’s small Jewish community petitioned the city’s board of aldermen to ask that one hundred square feet of what is now called the Bennington Street Cemetery — situated then on an island in the harbor that had just recently been renamed “East Boston” — be set aside to lay their dead to rest. The request was denied.
Determined to create a local burial site for those of their faith, and weary of the effort it took to transport the recently deceased to consecrated ground out of state, the group returned to the board three months later with a slightly different plan: they would purchase a plot of land in an undeveloped part of that same island, about a quarter-mile away from the six-year-old public graveyard. This time the city’s leaders agreed to the proposal, and the congregation applied their recently chosen name — Ohabei Shalom, meaning “Lovers of Peace” — to what became the first Jewish cemetery in Massachusetts.
‘Setting down roots’
“The first thing this congregation did, rather than build a temple or a synagogue, they established a cemetery, and that is very indicative of a Jewish community,” says Lisa Berenson, the director of development for the Jewish Cemetery Association of Massachusetts (JCAM), which now owns and manages Ohabei Shalom. “You can have a religious service anywhere — outdoors, in the house, any place — but you have to have a cemetery to bury your people. It also tells the community that you are setting down roots.”
According to Berenson the group paid $2,000 for the land and charged members of the congregation $5 per plot. The cemetery is still active today, though it’s a bit more costly to purchase a site.
About a half-century after the graveyard’s founding, construction began on a Gothic Revival-style funeral chapel using coarse gray and light brown stones, and it opened in 1903. By then the congregation had relocated several times within Boston, finally moving to Brookline in 1925, but waves of Jewish immigrants — predominantly from Russia, Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe — began arriving in the 1890s, settling in communities around the Mystic River.
By 1900 the region was home to some 40,000 Jews, and for a while East Boston was the largest Jewish community in New England, topping out near 7,000 — about 11 percent of the population — in the late 1910s. There were five synagogues in the neighborhood by that time, the first of which was Ohel Jacob, built in 1893 at the corner of Paris and Gove streets.
The Jewish immigrants, along with a bigger influx of Italians, came to East Boston as residents of Irish descent were moving to other communities in and around the city, and Jewish-owned businesses opened all around Maverick Square and up and down Sumner, Meridian, Chelsea and Bennington streets. By the 1930s, however, many Jews were already leaving for Chelsea, Revere, Malden, Medford and elsewhere, though a handful of businesses remained into the 1970s — among them were Lacey’s on Bennington Street (clothing and home furnishings), Ladinsky’s on Chelsea Street (discount clothing) and Kushner’s on Brooks Street (shoes). Only Kappy’s Liquors, started by the Kaplan family, survives today.
‘A community resource’
On a Sunday afternoon in late August a bus pulls up on Wordsworth Street outside the Ohabei Shalom Cemetery entrance. Members of the Jewish Historical Society of the North Shore, mostly older couples, deliberately make their way off the bus, greeted by Berenson, who gives them a tour of the grounds, recounting the graveyard’s history and pointing out Jewish symbols and Hebrew words on some of the stones.
JCAM is in the midst of a $3.5 million campaign to renovate the cemetery’s chapel, and recent grants from the Massachusetts Historical Commission totaling $80,000 have paid for the first stages of the project — stabilizing the walls, pointing the stones, patching the roof, and fixing windows and doors. The big picture is ambitious.
“There will be an interactive exhibit hall dedicated to the neighborhood and the early Jewish communities of the Mystic River area, including East Boston, Chelsea and Revere,” says Berenson. “We’re going to make it a community resource center where people are going to come in and use it. It’ll be lively and interactive, and boost the neighborhood.”
That vision is still a long way off. The chapel has been neglected for years and is unkempt and dusty inside. Pews are sitting about at odd angles, patches of drywall are crumbling and boards are piled in a corner. Still, the exterior stone work is impressive, the pointed-arch doors are regal and the large stained-glass window is exquisite.
‘A strong feeling’ for East Boston
More than 200 people gathered at the cemetery in 2006 as JCAM kicked off the Ohabei Shalom Chapel capital campaign. The keynote speaker that afternoon was Steve Grossman, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and today a candidate for state treasurer. The neighborhood is a special place for Grossman’s family.
At the turn of the century Isaac and Rebecca Grossman left Bessarabia — a landlocked chunk of Eastern Europe that has spent time as part of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, Romania, the Soviet Union and finally the country of Moldova — and brought their 13 children to East Boston. Isaac had been a wheat merchant, but he and his wife opened a small grocery store on Morris Street across from the James Otis School.
The second-youngest of their kids, Max, left school in the sixth grade to shine shoes on the ferry that crossed the harbor to and from downtown Boston. He also picked up a few dollars doing other odd jobs, including delivering envelopes — a career path that would pay off in the future. Max worked on the successful 1910 mayoral campaign of John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald — the maternal grandfather of President Kennedy. It was the beginning of a relationship between the Grossmans and the Kennedys that continues today.
Steve Grossman is now president of the business that his grandfather started in 1910 as the Massachusetts Envelope Company and just three years ago became Grossman Marketing Group. Steve says that even after his grandfather moved from East Boston, he “always had a strong feeling” for the neighborhood and “an affinity for people from East Boston.”
Directly behind the chapel at Ohabei Shalom is a big stone that marks the Grossman plots. Amidst a sea of granite in various shades of gray, this one is pink. It’s fitting, as Max Grossman “had a flair for the dramatic,” says his grandson.
“He always dressed magnificently,” says Steve Grossman, “because he had come from nothing.”
East Boston is the place where Max Grossman became something, and to honor this his descendants — who haven’t lived in the neighborhood for decades — have more than two dozen plots reserved at Ohabei Shalom.
