The rusted, once-elegant sign bearing the name Beth Jacob Cemetery is missing letters. One of two entrance gates is missing altogether.
Inside, many of the 275 gravestones marked by Jewish stars lie facedown or on their side, obscured by weeds and, in some cases, partly swallowed by the earth.
Some inscriptions, many in Hebrew, are no longer legible.
The East Side cemetery, at the end of a dead-end street, has been fading into oblivion.
But on Sunday, volunteers, including members of Boy Scout Troop 156, continued a cleanup begun a week earlier to return a sense of order and dignity to the old burial ground. They gathered once again in the cemetery on Lansdale Place, off Koons Avenue, to clear overgrown brush, trim trees and pick up garbage.
Last week, about 50 adult volunteers, including a dozen from the immediate neighborhood, joined the cleanup. They were helped by the Tree Doctor, which brought in a brush hog operated by staff at no expense, and the English Gardener, which provided use of a chain saw and other brush-cutting equipment.
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The cleanup will continue July 20 and July 27 between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., with volunteers encouraged to participate.
"We are making a ton of progress. It's a shame [the cemetery] fell into such bad condition," said 15-year-old Joshua Finkelstein of Amherst, the troop's senior patrol leader and a sophomore at Nichols School.
The idea for the cleanup originated with Dr. Mark S. Finkelstein, Josh's father and the troop's scoutmaster. "For a number of years, I've been aware of the cemetery and the lack of proper cleanup. When my son progressed through scouting, I recommended this would be a wonderful mitzvah to undertake for his Eagle leadership project."
Volunteer Laurence K. Rubin, president of Temple Beth Zion, praised the organizers. "These people -- the ones who organized it, who got up and said something's got to be done -- are just doing a fantastic job, the kids and the families."
The cemetery has been struck by extensive vandalism. Adding to the problem is a well-worn path that runs to one side of the cemetery and its broken, wrought-iron fence, creating a shortcut past railroad tracks to residential Hazel Place.
The cemetery is separated by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire from Concordia Cemetery, a larger and better-maintained resting ground founded in 1859.
Beth Jacob Cemetery was once tied to Congregation Beth Jacob, incorporated in 1881 at Clinton and Walnut streets, one of 12 Orthodox Jewish shuls on the East Side as late as the 1940s that no longer exist.
Congregation Beth Jacob, which no longer stands, was transferred to the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority in May 1959 for a massive urban-renewal project. Urban renewal would contribute to the Jewish population's exodus into the suburbs and the abandonment of the city's synagogues.
Most buried in Beth Jacob Cemetery, also known as Doat Street Cemetery, died in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, with a smattering buried in the 1970s and 1980s, and one person in the early 1990s. Jewish Federation Cemetery Corp. assumed ownership in 2002, and ensures that the grass is mowed.
Charlotte Gendler, the federation's controller and administrator of the corporation from 1981 to 2007, said the burial ground has long been a sore spot for the Jewish community.
"We really felt the need to maintain it with some dignity," Gendler said. "There are a lot of local families who have family members buried there, and feel very strongly it should be kept as well as it can. It's off the beaten path unfortunately."
Richard Handel, whose grandmother was buried there in 1916, has been troubled by the cemetery's condition. "It certainly is a distressing thing to see all the monuments down," Handel said.
The Schulgassers, a deeply religious family that later moved away, insisted on maintaining the cemetery during the 1980s and '90s despite criticism that it was devoting minimal attention to the site.
Jewish organizations stepped in a couple of times. Once, after 20 headstones were damaged in a vandalism spree in 2001, the Saranac Shul and others, including the Boy Scout troop of St. Gregory the Great Catholic Church, rallied to assist the cemetery.
The federation obtained ownership in 2002 after Irving Haber, a retired North Buffalo milkman and the last known living member of Congregation Beth Jacob, signed an affidavit approving the cemetery's transfer from the defunct shul, said David G. Cohen, the attorney who facilitated the transfer.
The corporation also maintains five Jewish cemeteries on Pine Ridge Heritage Boulevard in Cheektowaga, all tied to shuls no longer in existence.
Cohen, who serves on the corporation's board, said the decline and virtual abandonment of Beth Jacob Cemetery is not unusual.
"This is a phenomenon occurring in all the Rust Belt cities where suburban sprawl and population decline have combined to make urban congregations of every religious stripe fail," Cohen said.
"You struggle to at least maintain a tolerable level of decline in the cemeteries or structures they leave behind. But it's a losing proposition."
The cost of redoing Beth Jacob Cemetery, which has no walkways and few visitors, with new concrete foundations to secure all of the headstones, and other improvements, drew an estimate of $165,000, even more if adding the cost of a new fence, Mark Finkelstein said.
Board President Jerome D. Carrel said that the corporation's "break-even budget" made that impossible but that it would strive to maintain the cemetery at a reasonable level.
Peter A. Weinmann, chairman of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said he was encouraged by the renewed effort to care for "the forgotten cemetery."
e-mail: msommer@buffnews.com
