Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries

The Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries are a group of 42 Jewish cemeteries[1] in use since the 1920s on Baker Street in the West Roxbury section of Boston. The cemeteries are located on land that once formed part of Brook Farm, a 19th-century communal-living experiment.

The series of small cemeteries are strung along both sides of a narrow access road at 776 Baker Street[1] that leads only to the last of the small cemeteries. Each was owned and managed by an individual Boston-area congregation or Jewish organization.[2]

According to The Boston Globe, "the Baker Street cemeteries are home to some of the city's most striking, albeit endangered, examples of historic religious architecture. Dotting the road are 10 chapel buildings about the size of one-room schoolhouses, perfectly rendered synagogues in miniature, with glorious stained glass, vaulted ceilings, ornate chandeliers, oak pulpits, and other vestiges of the final destination for members of a once-thriving immigrant community."[3]

Over the years, many of the small congregations that supported several sections of the cemeteries have dissolved as the leadership passed on and there were no young members to take their places. In the late 1980s, after several years of neglect, the Jewish Cemetery Association of Massachusetts (JCAM) was granted the rights to the abandoned cemeteries so that they could be restored and maintained, and have plots made available for new interments.