The Old Jewish Burial Ground

Go to the corner of E. Huron and Fletcher. This puts you between the glass front of the Power Center for the Performing Arts and the stone side of the University of Michigan’s Rackham Building. Cross to the Rackham side of the intersection, face the building, and look down. You’ll see this plaque, which is perhaps twice the size of a tombstone:

It reads:

MICHIGAN'S FIRST JEWISH CEMETERY SITE

At this site the first Jewish cemetery in Michigan was established in 1848-49. The Jews Society of Ann Arbor acquired burial rights to this land adjacent to what was then the public cemetery. Several years earlier, immigrants from Germany and Austria had organized the first Jewish community in the state. The first religious services were held in the homes of the five Weil brothers in the vicinity of the family tannery. J. Weil and Brothers, members of the Jewish community, participated in all aspects of the city's life. Jacob Weil served Ann Arbor as alderman from 1859 to 1861. By the 1880s this original Jewish community no longer existed. In 1900 the remains of those buried here were reinterred in Ann Arbor's Forest Hill Cemetery.

Sponsored by Beth Israel Congregation and the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, 1983/5743

Look past the plaque, and you’ll see … well, kind of nothing: a hedge partially surrounding a slightly scrubby side yard with a few mature trees.

Historical markers take things no longer visible—the spot where someone famous slept or spoke or went to school, the original location of a notable structure, the site of a forgotten graveyard—and make them visible once more. But in doing so, they often obscure fairly obvious questions. In this case: 

1. What happened to make this Jewish community abruptly “no longer exist” after only about 30 years?  
2. If there is no sign of a cemetery here now, and there was no sign of it when the marker was placed in 1983, and all the Jews who used the cemetery were long gone by 1900, how did anyone know a cemetery was ever here? 
3. What happened in 1983 to make the State of Michigan put up this historic marker?

The final question is the easiest to answer: around 1980 some frat boys showed up at the University of Michigan branch of Hillel with a stone slab. While cleaning up their property, these fellas had flipped over a large rectangular stone paver emblazoned with the frat’s initials, which served as a step outside their door. Surprisingly, the underside was covered in Hebrew engraving. As it turned out, the doormat they’d been using for as long as anyone could remember was some Jew’s tombstone.

One hopes that this was at least moderately upsetting to them. Maybe it was just funny. Kids, amiright?

Either way, their next step—returning the gravestone to the nearest available Jews—was basically decent. Hillel did something a bit more rational, and passed the stone on to Beth Israel Congregation. Beth Israel was (and is) the area’s oldest Jewish congregation, established in 1916 by Ann Arbor’s first Jews. It would be reasonable to assume they’ be able to return this marker to its proper home. 

But the stone proved to be a riddle for the folks at Beth Israel. 

It was dated 1858, which was decades prior to the arrival of Ann Arbor’s “first” Jewish family, the Lanskies, who were among Beth Israel's founders. And it had marked the burial place of “Reila Weil,” a person from a family none of Ann Arbor’s Jews had ever heard of. 

All of this piqued the curiosity of Helen Aminoff, an administrator at the Beth Israel Congregation. Aminoff spent the next several years tracking down the cemetery, excavating and untangling the history of those early Jews of Ann Arbor, and successfully petitioning the State to place the marker in 1983.

This leaves the first question, the one that should probably leap to mind any time someone chooses to use the passive voice when telling you that a whole bunch of people sort of mysteriously “no longer exist.” You know, like how most of the shtetls in Europe no longer exist, or how the Ann Arbor-area settlements of the Anishinaabe people of the Three Fires Confederacy no longer exist.

What happened to make these First Jews of Ann Arbor—men and women who “participated in all aspects of the city's life,” including holding elected public office—abruptly leave after only 30 years?

The short answer is that we don’t know. Gravestones and markers are made of stone and steel; they stick around to tell their tale. Dinner table conversations, late night arguments, and innumerable slights and snubs in the street decay with the bodies of those that experienced them without memorializing them on paper, stone, or steel.

But we do know a few things.

We know Solomon Weil was Ann Arbor’s first Jew. He arrived in 1845.

We know that his brothers soon followed, often bringing their wives and children (including Reila Weil, whose gravestone became a frat doormat; she was the wife of Solomon’s younger brother, Moses).

We know that within just three years the Five Brothers Weil had acquired land for a cemetery, despite having neither a congregation or anyone to bury yet (the earliest burial was likely in 1853). Acquiring the cemetery land was most likely the work of Jacob Weil, the last of the Brothers Weil to arrive in America. Jacob had trained as a rabbi and graduated with honors from the University of Hungary. He was fluent in French (presumably in addition to his native Yiddish, Hungarian, and German). More importantly, Jacob could apparently speak some form of Algonquin. Being conversant in both French and an indigenous dialect allowed him to travel and trade freely among the French-Canadian fur trappers and indigenous populations of Southeast Michigan. This trade in hides and pelts formed the basis of a retail business the Weil Brothers ultimately parlayed into a successful tannery in Ann Arbor.

We also know that in 1850 the Weils held Michigan’s first public Jewish religious services. Doing that required:

1. At least 10 adult male Jews (the minimum needed for public prayer under Jewish law at that time)
2. A Torah

A Torah is a big investment, both in 1850 and today. It is a hand-scribed holy book written on a ritually prepared calfskin parchment scroll by a specially trained rabbi. It takes an entire year to create a Torah—which, predictably, makes Torahs both expensive and scarce. Today, a new Torah costs about as much as a new car. In 1850, the Brothers Weil had to ask their parents (Joseph and Sarah) to bring one from Prague when they emigrated. 

To recap: we know that within five years of the first Weil settling in Ann Arbor, they had brought their entire family here, attracted at least four more adult male Jews, bought land for a cemetery they didn’t yet need, and acquired an extremely expensive ritual object of no practical use (apart from sustaining a religious community of Jews).

All of this seems to be the efforts of people who intended to stay. They owned land here, headquartered prosperous businesses here. Their children were born here, and some of them died and were buried here. By 1859 Jacob Weil was elected alderman for the second ward. He was reelected in 1860. A year after that he’d left Michigan entirely. Over the course of the next few years all the Weils—and most of the other Jews in town—either left for sunnier streets and greener pastures, or got planted in the old Jewish burial ground. 

We know all this. We Just don’t know why Ann Arbor’s first Jews left. 

Go to the second floor of the Ann Arbor District Library’s Downtown Branch. Head to the far corner where they keep the final remnant of the archival microfilm collection in a set of  shallow drawers. Find the boxes of microfilm for the Michigan Argus. This was the area’s local weekly paper when the first Jews came to Ann Arbor. Look at almost any issue between late-1851 and mid-1852 and you’ll find this advertisement:

This ad ran in every issue of the Argus from September 3, 1851 to May 12, 1852 (and potentially longer; there are gaps in the archives). In the context of the papers it seems likely that this ad targets not Jews in general, but one specific Jew: Simon Guiterman. Guiterman was one of the two proprietors of a competing clothier, Sykes & Guiterman. His five-year-old son, Max, would go on to be buried in the abandoned Jewish cemetery.

We’ll never know what Simon Guiterman did to inspire William O’Hara to spend money running the “Opposition to Jews” ad 36+ times. We’ll note that there were other clothiers in town with German, French, and English surnames, but no corresponding advertisements in opposition to Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, or (ahem) Irishmen.

We have no record of what the rest of the Jews of Ann Arbor thought of this ad campaign, or when they started to leave. According to Aminhoff’s research the final remnant of Ann Arbor’s first Jewish community, the Fantles (who were probably Jacob Weil’s niece and nephew), left in 1884 or 1885.

At its height Ann Arbor’s first Jewish community likely numbered around 60 souls. We don’t know how many died as residents, nor how many were laid to rest in the old Jewish burial ground. Records show at least ten were buried here, but even that’s extremely hard to piece together, given the state of record keeping at that time, Jewish customs, and the fact that all of the live Jews had gone.

In 1899 the “Old Jewish Burial Ground” was finally obliterated and the “remains taken up.” Ten plots were purchased in Forest Hill Cemetery, but only six Jews were moved to these new digs. What happened to the other four (or more) bodies? Aminoff hypothesized they may have been stolen by U-M medical students, who were notorious grave robbers in the late 19th Century. Given practices at the time, it’s just as likely that these dead Jews are still there, next to Rackham. In the early 1900s, as Michigan communities grew, graveyards often needed to be moved, and the cost of moving those graves usually fell to the families, and was often neglected—even in the case of extremely notable corpses. As a practical matter, it was all too common to move the headstones and leave the bodies in place (a plot point you may recall from Poltergeist). 

Predictably, houses were built on the old Jewish burial ground, and then later demolished to make way for the Rackham Building. Perhaps the odd vacant corner memorialized with this marker, like Felch Park across the street and the Britton Woods section of the County Farm Park, has been left undeveloped specifically because many Ann Arborites suspected that there were still bodies there. 

I probably should have led with a trigger warning, as there are many elements of this story that modern readers may find distressing: religious intolerance and ethnic intimidation; desecration of graves and medical body snatching; blatant public antisemitism evidently left unchecked. 

I don’t have to tell you that the America of 1850 was a much coarser country, one where justice often failed to prevail and freedom’s ring could be quite muffled. The Ann Arbor of 170+ years ago is not the Ann Arbor of today.

Go to the corner of Washtenaw Avenue and Austin Avenue on any Saturday morning since 2003. Look toward Beth Israel Congregation (the oldest Jewish congregation in Ann Arbor). You’ll see this sign, among dozens along a similar theme, being displayed by Ann Arborites:

You’ll also be standing within an easy walk of my home. I came here in 1995, 110 years after the First Jews in Ann Arbor decided to be Jews someplace else. As someone who’s been a Jew in Ann Arbor for about 30 years, I can’t begin to imagine why they left.

“[Ann Arbor’s first Jews] were all very successful and respected. They all until the time of their death, had a warm feeling for Ann Arbor and particularly for their old neighbors.”
—“Old Jewish Burial Ground Will Be Obliterated in a Few Days”
The Ann Arbor Argus-Democrat
September 29, 1899