Description of the attraction
Mount Carmel Cemetery is located in Queens, in the so-called "cemetery belt" surrounding the Glendale quarter. The Rural State Cemeteries Act of 1847 in New York prescribed no new burial sites in Manhattan and recommended that they do so in Brooklyn and Queens. So Glendale was almost surrounded by cemeteries - there are now twenty-nine of them.
Mount Carmel, founded in 1906, was named after Mount Carmel, a sacred site in Israel, and has become one of the most important Jewish cemeteries in America. It consists of two lots, old and new, lying between Jackie Robinson Parkway and Cooper Avenue. Here, on forty hectares, there are more than eighty-five thousand graves, in which many famous figures of American history are buried.
Behind a wrought iron fence and brick pillars at the entrance, there are immaculate lawns, flowers, shrubs and trees leaning over the manicured monuments. The old cemetery houses the so-called Street of Honor - a pantheon of creators and politicians who came to the United States from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Dozens of trade union leaders and writers who were voices of the Jewish proletariat are buried here. Among them - the founder of the Jewish daily newspaper in Yiddish "Forverts" Abraham Kahan, anarchist writer Saul Yanovsky, poet and editor Maurice Vinchevsky, politician Meyer London (the first socialist elected to the US Congress).
Theatrical actors Sarah and Jacob Adler, film actor George Tobias, famous humorist, "king of witticisms" Henny Youngman, lawyer and feminist Bella Abzug (the first Jewish woman elected to the US Congress) are also buried on Mount Carmel.
The most famous grave in this cemetery looks modest: a black monument, closely surrounded by other graves. Under it lies the world famous writer Sholem Aleichem, one of the founders of Yiddish literature. His novels, plays, stories, telling about the life of ordinary Jews with simplicity and humor, were adored by the readers. Many called him the Jewish Mark Twain, and when Mark Twain heard about this, he asked: "Please tell him that I am the American Sholem Aleichem."
So famous was Sholem Aleichem that his death in 1916 caused a real explosion of grief in New York, where he moved at the end of his life. Hundreds of thousands of Jews took to the streets of the city to accompany the horse hearse moving from Harlem to Queens, people both on the streets and in the windows cried openly, seeing off their favorite writer. In fact, Sholem Aleichem wanted to be buried in Kiev (he was born in Pereyaslav, not far from Kiev), but this desire was not fulfilled, and people come to bow to his ashes here, to the black monument in the Mount Carmel cemetery.
