Jewish Waldheim
These images give a bare glimpse of Waldheim Cemetery, the resting place of 175,000 Jewish Chicagoans. The two individual grave sites depicted below are those of my Great-Grandmother Frieda and my Great-Great-Grandfather Lazer. During one my last conversations with him before he died almost a decade ago, my grandfather told me how much he worried about his mother's grave. When I visited it recently it was in somewhat neglected condition but not as bad as I had feared. My mother thinks the stain on the front of Frieda's stone is the result of rain dripping from a tree that used to stand overhead. When Frieda was buried at the age of 43, this part of Waldheim was new and bare. In the intervening years, a generation of wild saplings grew here and matured to the point where they established a complete canopy overhead. Over the past couple of decades, a number of those trees have fallen. Many graves, such as Frieda's, have thus been exposed to the sun for the first time since my mother was a child.
