by Florence Marmor
Mokom Sholom Cemetery (aka Bayside Cemetery) in Ozone Park, N.Y. is the site of an historic Jewish free burial area that dates from 1880 to 1901. It is about 1-1/2 acres in size and is the burial place of 11,500+ men, women, children, infants and stillbirths. It was the first organized attempt by New York's Jews to provide for this major need. New York City had many indigent Jews, among which were many Galitzianers, in the time frame of the free burial.
Galitzianers are a great proportion of burials in this free burial section. They lived in such crowded conditions with Russians, Hungarians, other Poles and non-Jews as well. Most lived in New York City's teeming East Side, though a few did make it uptown and to Brooklyn. They lived in the old-law tenements for the most part, mainly the dumbbell tenements (so-called because if you looked at them from above they resembled a dumbbell), with poor air and sanitation. They had outside toilets, mainly in back yards, and almost no indoor plumbing could be found. The yards reeked from the toilet facilities and garbage that was thrown from the windows.
Deaths came frequently and diseases unheard of today were prevalent - cholera, typhus, exhaustion, diphtheria, etc. Some were epidemic and endemic, arising from the prevailing conditions in these buildings. Most of the people were cared for in their homes but a few did go to hospitals, i.e. Mt. Sinai, Gouveneur, Bellevue, etc.
In 1994 I and others began to create a database of information about thousands of burials in Mokom Sholom's free burial area. The information in the database was compiled from monuments in the cemetery, from death certificates, and from any other sources of information that we could find. In addition, we are involved in an ongoing search for descendents of the people buried in the free burial area.
The information in the database on this web page is a subset of the larger database, and contains only records on Galitzianers and those whose death certificates state "Austria" or "Austria-Poland." In some cases people buried in the cemetery were children of "mixed marriages" - e.g., Litvaks and Galitzianers. Anyone with at least one Galician parent has been included in this database. All others who along with their parents were born outside of "Galicia," "Austria," or "Austria-Poland," including those whose birthplaces and parents' birthplaces are unknown, have been excluded. A total of 458 names are contained in the database.
The information on the headstones, death certificates, and other sources is only as accurate as the knowledge of the informant. Errors, including classifying someone as "from Russia" instead of Austria were not uncommon. This is an on-going project; information will be continuously added and corrected.
If anyone recognizes any of the Galitzianers in the Free Burial at Mokom Sholom Cemetery, please contact me at the email address below.
While I am happy to do lookups in my records to find people who were not from Galicia, it is important that in addition to the surname you have some approximate idea of the person's first name, date of death, and place of burial. Requests for lookups without these three additional pieces of information cannot be accepted.
Florence Marmor
Florence1933@aol.com
Search for a surname. You may enter either the entire name or just a prefix. Use the "plaintext" search method only when you are sure of the exact spelling. The "dmsoundex" search method will look for names that sound like the name that you type.
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Gesher Galicia gratefully acknowledges the contribution of this database by Florence Marmor.
