‘What they have done is a sin’: Woman furious with those who failed to upkeep cemetery where her relatives are buried

Cara Krulewitch was in town for a nephew’s bar mitzvah , when she decided to do something she’d wanted to do for years — visit her ancestors’ graves on the South Side.

What Krulewitch, 64, found left her heartbroken.

“I was shocked. I couldn’t believe the condition of the cemetery when we walked in,” said Krulewitch, a nurse midwife who grew up in Chicago but now lives in Maryland.

She was talking about the Jewish Cemetery at the southern edge of Oak Woods Cemetery on the South Side. In May, the Chicago Sun-Times reported how the section has been all but abandoned because the original congregations have long since moved away from the neighborhood, and, according to one of those congregations, there isn’t the money to pay for the upkeep of the cemetery. Many graves have been overturned or neglected and a cemetery building had been decimated.

“What they have done is a sin,” said Krulewitch, who trudged through the graveyard with her husband in search of her great- and great-great grandparents.

After about two hours of searching in the rain, Krulewitch said they found one set of grandparents, and then, nearby, the other — Simon and Betsy Krulewitch — behind a sprawling oak tree.

“I kept walking up and down the path,” Krulewitch said. “I kept looking at this oak tree. It was like Simon called me to peek behind the tree.”

Krulewitch said she and her husband returned the next day with a branch trimmer to cut back the tree, bringing the headstones into the sunlight.

She said she didn’t ask permission: “From whom? Who would I ask?”

Likely not the folks at Oak Woods Cemetery’s reception area. Dignity Memorial — the company that owns the larger cemetery — told the Sun-Times in May that they don’t own the Jewish section and that’s why they don’t maintain it.

Krulewitch said someone should step up. She said she reached out to the Skokie synagogue that owns a portion of the Jewish cemetery — Congregation Kesser Maariv — but has not heard back.

A rabbi from another of the synagogues, Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel in Lake View, told the Sun-Times in May that both congregations are doing what they can.

“I’m not sure there is an easy fix to the remaining problems at Oak Woods,” Rabbi Paul Saiger said in an email. “We will continue to do maintenance at basic levels. But there is no way for a congregation like ours to keep it at the level of a professionally managed prosperous business like Dignity.”

Krulewitch said she has little sympathy for the argument that there isn’t money to pay for maintenance.

“To me, it’s a sin because you have allotted that burial ground to those who were members of the congregation, and now you abandon them because they are dead?” she said.

Krulewitch — who said she has since located another possible ancestor in the cemetery, a 6-year-old with her same last name — said she’s considering starting a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the cemetery’s upkeep.

“I was very upset to see it like that. It broke my heart,” she said.