A hidden Jewish cemetery in the Village

Yesterday I was seeing a show in Greenwich Village and since meandering aimlessly through the Village is one of my favorite things in this world, I got there early so I could...you know...meander aimlessly.

Somewhere past the fairytale-esque Jefferson Library and rows of adorable red brick townhouses (specifically, on 11th St near 6th Ave), I stumbled upon this all but hidden cemetery.

A triangular walled plot is all that now remains of what was once a much larger graveyard. Back then, the Village was considered the countryside, a place where the denizens of NYC would often escape to when infectious diseases swept through the city.

Theoretically, I knew this cemetery existed. It's one of four NYC cemeteries owned by Congregation Shearith Israel, North America's first Jewish congregation founded in 1654 (this cemetery dates to 1805). The others are located in Chinatown, on 21st St, and in Queens.

The cemetery in Chinatown was the congregation's first and main cemetery, whereas this one was mainly used for immigrants who weren't part of the congregation, victims of yellow fever and malaria, and suicide victims.

However, there are a couple of semi-famous people buried here, most notably Ephraim Hart: a Revolutionary War veteran who helped found the NY Stock Exchange. Apparently he also founded a charity to ensure that Jewish dead were buried in consecrated ground.

This started when Hart himself happened upon a Jewish pauper being buried in a Potter's Field (there were several throughout the city, with one on the current site of Washington Square Park), and personally paid for him to be buried in a Jewish cemetery instead.

Hart seems to have been deeply respected by his peers, as the inscription on his tombstone shows:

He died Sunday, 2nd day of Av, 5585, that at the time of his death he had been a resident of this city for 40 years, an extremely charitable man and an earnest communal worker, especially in the direction of strengthening the faith of his fathers.

His grave is now marked by a reconstructed tombstone and an American flag.

The cemetery isn't open to the public, but you can see just about all of it through the gate and over the top of the wall, and it looks like most of the gravestones are illegible at this point anyway. Still, it's a quaint reminder that just about every single block of NYC is full of history.

Leaving pebbles on or near gravestones is an ancient Jewish tradition, and visitors seem to have left some here fairly recently: a sign that this historic cemetery is still an important part of New York City.