One of the most important functions performed by a new Jewish community, established anywhere in the world, is the proper and religiously driven burial of Jewish souls, whether a member of a community or a traveller or itinerant merchant of some kind. We Jews have very strict rules when it comes to burial and when we have established communities, no matter where, we have needed almost immediately to attend to how and where to bury someone. In St. Catharines, in the early years, this was not any different.
For years, our deceased member were buried in Hamilton or over the Niagara River in Buffalo. Most frequently though it was in Hamilton where the established Jewish community had already created not only a cemetery but a building on the grounds of the cemetery for the Tahara or ritual purification required of a Jewish burial. In the very early years this was never a real problem. One of our oldest families, the Adelstein family used to bury their dead in Hamilton. I know t his because the last surviving member of that generation born in Canada used to visit the cemetery at High Holy Day time and told me he’d already been to Hamilton where his parent were buried. Many of the early families, the Newmans, the Morrises and so forth had family plots in Hamilton. But eventually, it became apparent that there was no need to do that any more.
A group of our members, including Morris Slepkov, went to the City of St. Catharines and arranged to buy a segment of the land set aside for the Victoria Lawn Cemetery which was the municipal cemetery. By 1952, the severance was complete and we had our own cemetery on Bunting Road. Since then, there have been numerous burials to the point where we are over 400 individual plots occupied.
Cemetery-Agreement-St-Catharines
In 1954 or thereabouts, a relatively new immigrant to St Catharines, Phillip Kamin, who built the Leonard and the Queensway Hotels, passed away suddenly of a stroke. When his shiva was over, the family donated enough money to erect the Kamin Memorial Chapel on the grounds of the Cemetery to be used in funerals thereafter. The pictures below show two views of that building.
