Saranac Lake, NY – Vandals Knock Over Jewish Cemetery Headstones

Saranac Lake, NY – Some vandals knocked over about a dozen headstones in the Hebrew Memorial Cemetery in Pine Ridge Cemetery.

Cemetery caretaker Mike Madden said he discovered the headstones knocked over around and set them back up later in the day. Some of the headstones were scratched, but there was no real damage, Madden said.

Madden reported the apparent vandalism to village police, and six or eight of the headstones were still down when they arrived, said Sgt. James Law, the investigating officer. None of the headstones appeared broken or chipped, Law said. Police found an empty beer container on a lower tier of the section of the cemetery that was vandalized, and a cigarette butt on a higher wall. Police also found some broken flag sticks, but the flags, decorating veterans’ graves for Memorial Day, were missing.

Pine Ridge Cemetery is owned by the families of the people whose relatives are buried there. To maintain it, a nonprofit group raises money from contributions, plot sales and burials. There are two tiers to the Jewish section; the vandalism was on the higher tier.

One of the stones that got knocked over was a stone that memorializes 25 members of the Ring family that were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Cemetery Association Treasurer Kitty Peightal said the association started to have more people work in the cemetery a few years ago, which discouraged vandalism.

The Pine Ridge Cemetery is situated on what used to be the Moody family farm, the village’s first settlement. The first known burial there was Sally B. Moody in 1852, according to a pamphlet put out by Historic Saranac Lake in 1988. The first Catholic burials were in 1891, and St. Bernard’s Church acquired a plot there in 1894. (It later started its own cemetery, at the corner of Ampersand Avenue and Forest Home Road.) The first burials in the Hebrew Memorial Cemetery were in 1915, and it was dedicated in 1919.

“It shows the multiethnic attitudes of the town,” Arlan said. “It was a very cosmopolitan town in those days.”