Mount Hope Cemetery is a municipal, Victorian cemetery, founded in 1838 by the City of Rochester. Its glacially carved landscape includes over 350,000 graves belonging to people of every religion, race, ethnicity, and social background. Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass are among the famous people buried here. Mount Hope’s Jewish history began in 1848 when Temple B’rith Kodesh purchased a plot of land in Mount Hope to create the first organized Jewish burial space in Rochester. Since then, many small and large Rochester Jewish congregations have purchased plots of land in Mount Hope for Jewish burial.
The Friends of Mount Hope (FOMH) is a non-profit organization of volunteers who restore, preserve and encourage public use of the cemetery. In the spring of 2021, the FOMH became aware that numerous Holocaust survivors were interred at Mount Hope. They created the FOMH Holocaust Committee in order to identify the survivors, create a FOMH Holocaust Archive, and to erect a monument to their memory. After a successful fundraising campaign and identification of more than 110 survivors, the Holocaust monument was dedicated on May 7, 2023.
The FOMH Holocaust Committee had worked with both the Center for Holocaust Awareness and Information (CHAI) of the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester and the Monroe Community College Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Project (MCC HGHRP) in identifying the survivors buried at Mount Hope. By the summer of 2023 it became clear there was a need to create a community-wide database of all Holocaust survivors who settled in Rochester. It would need to build on and connect the work that has already been done by the Center for Holocaust Awareness and Information (CHAI), The Friends of Mount Hope (FOMH) Holocaust Archive, the Jewish Community Center (JCC), Monroe Community College's Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Project (MCC-HGHRP), and Jewish Family Service (JFS). Each of the above organizations has its own database of survivor names and some of their stories. While there is much overlap between the various organizations’ documentation, no single database was complete and there is much work still to be done in recording the stories of the survivors.
In June of 2023 the FOMH Holocaust Committee, with the support of CHAI and MCC-HGHRP, applied for and was awarded an Ignite Grant from the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester to create a new database that would be comprehensive, integrated, and expandable as new information about survivors is discovered. Since the proposed database would also include burial locations for each survivor, a long-term goal of this project is to create digital maps of Mount Hope Cemetery, Britton Road Cemetery, White Haven Cemetery, and other Rochester burial locations that would allow people to physically locate any survivor’s local gravesite and learn their story.
Six students from the Digital Media Capstone class at the University of Rochester are working with the FOMH Holocaust Committee as part of their senior project. They have begun the digital mapping of Range 10 of Mount Hope Cemetery where about 60 Holocaust survivors are buried. Some of these students are also working to update older video and audio recordings, including making 5-minute summaries of the longer recordings. This website is produced by these wonderful students: Jodie Zeng, Qiqi Xu, Sherry Kou, Sylvia Zhang, Yunyi Huang, and Jack Cunningham under the guidance of their faculty members Nancy Bernardo and Stephanie Ashenfelder.
Jan 29, 2024 - Marcia Birken