Cemeteries
From the 19th until the early half of the 20th centuries, most of St. Catharines’s Jews were buried in Hamilton, Toronto or Buffalo. On 21 February 1950, Abraham Newman, Edward Offstein, Aaron Bogomolny, Ralph Hoffman and Louis Burnstein purchased two acres of land for $1000 on Bunting Road, adjacent to Victoria Lawn Cemetery, near the old locks of the Welland Canal.
The synagogue set up a Chevra Kadisha, which was chaired by Mr. R.J. Hoffman and later Mr. B. Sharpe. The committee spent several years preparing the ground and landscaping the area before it was used under the guidance of Morris Slepkov. The first individual to be buried there was Harry Freed, the father-in-law of Abe Herzog.
The Kamin family paid for the construction of a small building, which was erected around 1952 and could accommodate about 30 people. It was intended to serve as a memorial for the late P. Kamin. As a member of the Chevra Kkadisha and because of his skills as a tailor, Morris Slepkov was responsible for constructing the first shroud. By 1975, there were approximately 110 graves in the cemetery.
