Press
Olive Branch Cemetery Restoration's efforts, as well as the plights of at-risk Jewish cemeteries, have been highlighted in a series of newspaper articles. If you are a newspaper or blog author interested in featuring our organization and its work, please contact Michael Shane Wamsley.
Olive Branch Cemetery Restoration
Weiner, Julie. "Shul Silent On Cemetery Database." The Jewish Week: 21 Oct 2005: Web.
"[Michael Shane Wamsley's] hope (part of a "four-point plan" for improving the Queens Jewish burial ground, much of which is overgrown with weeds and poison oak) is to publish the database on the Internet as a service to historians and Jewish genealogists with ancestors buried there. Genealogists say the database would be a valuable resource, one even terming it "unbelievable.""...Read More
Weiner, Julie. "Saving Cemeteries Here And Abroad; Mormons coming to rescue of rundown Bayside Cemetery." The Jewish Week: 16 May 2003: Web.
"I think it's really wonderful that Shane and his colleagues are interested in helping out the cemetery, in helping to restore it to a more acceptable condition, and that we'll all be able to be working together in this laudable goal," Werlin [Shaare Zedek president] said."...Read More
Neglected Cemeteries in New York and Utah
Leventhal, Neil. "Ashes to Ashes: A Film About the Restoration of the Bayside Cemetery." http://www.baysidecemetery.com/: Sep 2009: Web.
"The Bayside Cemetery is not only a memorial to Jews who lived many years ago but also a walking tour of American history. Buried among the mothers, fathers, beloved daughters and grandmothers (one of which being mine) are veterans of every major American conflict since the inception of our great nation. The Bayside Cemetery is a testament to the Jewish contribution to the Civil War and each and every war there after. The men and women that have been laid to rest at the Bayside Cemetery contributed on a global scale to the Jewish experience and to world history."...Video Link
Wilner, Anne. "Weeds Among the Graves, and Dismay Among the Survivors." The New York Times: 15 Aug 2008: Web.
"At the entrance to the cemetery, the branches of a rare Japanese maple crisscrossed in a lover's embrace. Inside one of the several dozen mausoleums, sunlight filtered through the purple ribbons and watery green wreaths of a stained-glass Tiffany window, but most of the headstones outside stood in a wild meadow of grass and flowers."...Read More
Weiner, Julie. "Vandals Strike Queens Cemetery." The Jewish Week: 17 Jan 2003: Web.
"Graves were opened and human remains exposed when a mausoleum was broken into recently at the Bayside Cemetery, a 160-year-old Jewish cemetery in Ozone Park, Queens."...Read More
Weiner, Julie. "Obstacle to Roots Search." The Jewish Week: 18 Oct 2002: Web.
"Allan Jordan, a Jewish genealogy buff from Roslyn, L.I., has hit a roadblock in tracking down his family history: Bayside Cemetery. "My great-grandfather is buried at Bayside, but we can't find the plot," says Jordan."...Read More
Weiner, Julie. "The Cemetery Nobody Wants." The Jewish Week: 18 Oct 2002: Web.
"Now the grass and dandelions grow high — although it is not nearly as bad as in many areas of the cemetery — and a section of the rusted iron fence cordoning off the plot is broken. Near the edge of the cemetery, where Rocke's grandparents are buried, the foliage is thicker and a small brass placard from the Jewish War Veterans lies on the ground."...Read More
Bayside Cemetery Litigation
Details about ongoing litigation (Lucker et al vs. Congregation Shaare Zedek, Bayside Cemetery and Community Association of Jewish At-Risk Cemeteries and Leventhal vs. Congregation Shaare Zedek, Bayside Cemetery and Community Association of Jewish At-Risk Cemeteries) concerning the state of disrepair and neglect at Bayside Cemetery are available at John Lucker's Bayside Cemetery Litigation website.