COMMUNITY ALLIANCE
FOR JEWISH-AFFILIATED
CEMETERIES
FOR JEWISH-AFFILIATED
CEMETERIES
WELCOME TO CAJAC
In keeping with the Jewish tradition to honor the dead, CAJAC represents the organized Jewish community’s consolidated efforts to preserve Jewish cemeteries and to create permanent solutions for ensuring their long-term sustainability. Through a collaboration of volunteers, community leaders and local agencies, CAJAC actively addresses the decline of Jewish cemeteries, frequently spearheading rehabilitation efforts to restore dignity and respect to distressed burial grounds.
ABOUT US
OUR MISSION
To honor the dead in accordance with Jewish tradition and to honor the living in their respect for their ancestors, the Community Association for Jewish At-Risk Cemeteries (CAJAC) is the critical link between the Jewish community’s living and the departed who can no longer speak for themselves. CAJAC sets standards, develops strategies, and assists those tasked as fiduciaries of Jewish Cemeteries to fulfill the sacred task of preserving their sanctity, ensuring their physical well-being, and providing for their financial stability into perpetuity.
CAJAC’s Core Objectives
- Raising awareness within the broader Jewish community on the vitality of Jewish cemeteries and their systemic challenges, emphasizing education and volunteerism as the primary vehicles by which to make kavod ha-met, respect of the deceased, of core concern to all Jewish people.
- Promoting best practices for long-term solvency and preservation of all Jewish burial grounds by providing guidance, resources, and training to Jewish organizations managing and/or operating Jewish cemeteries and burial grounds, including synagogues, burial societies, and cemetery administrators,
- Providing acute support to struggling Jewish cemeteries, including leveraging charitable and public resources to remediate physical and financial distress, with the core objective of assisting cemeteries in creating provisions for long-term care and self-sufficiency.
- Formulating responses to cemetery-related matters by establishing and maintaining liaison relationships with relevant governmental and regulatory authorities, serving as the Jewish community’s principal resource – and the secular community’s key partner in securing the future of Jewish cemeteries.
- Serving as a resource regarding consumer-related matters, fielding questions and concerns from a cemetery stakeholders and members of the public.
CAJAC can assist and advise Jewish cemeteries with
- Remounting and repairing fallen stones
- Removal of overgrowth and invasive growth including trees
- Repair and installation of fencing
- Graffiti removal
- Poison ivy remediation
- Indexing of graves
- Genealogy
- Matters pertaining to Jewish law
“When you mention Jewish cemeteries in America, the interest is not always there. My feeling is, Jewish history is Jewish history and how could you allow Jewish cemeteries to fall into disrepair and be overgrown? CAJAC represents the Jewish community’s collective response to cemetery preservation and it is continuing to become backstop to take care of Jewish cemeteries in Metropolitan New York.”
-Richard Fishman,
Former Director of the New York State Division of Cemeteries.
