Even as a small boy, Michael Hirsch loved visiting cemeteries.
His family would take him to visit his great-grandmother’s grave, and soon he came to see cemeteries as museums containing the stories and secrets of the past.
Over the years, Mr. Hirsch, a historian and genealogist, came to feel a sort of kinship with the dead and a duty to care for their graves.
Now 68, he has visited more cemeteries than he can count, cleaning headstones and often honoring people according to their religion, leaving stones on Jewish gravestones and palm crosses for Christian ones during Easter.
One day last November, Mr. Hirsch arrived at Most Holy Trinity Cemetery — 23 acres in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, tucked alongside the elevated subway line that carries the L train to Canarsie.
Some 25,000 people are buried at Most Holy Trinity, many of them working-class immigrants from Germany who were parishioners of the nearby Catholic churches.
Their lives were modest and so were their graves, marked not with expensive granite but with wooden crosses or metal markers in the shape of traditional gravestones.
The cemetery attracts few visitors but Mr. Hirsch has a particular fondness for the place.
When he arrived on Nov. 29, he was surprised to find the gates chained with a padlock and blocked by a concrete slab. A security guard walked over and opened the tall, cast-iron doors.
What he saw when he stepped through left him overcome with sadness, unable to speak.
The markers, hundreds of them, were gone — harvested, pulled from the ground like crops. Most Holy Trinity was now a field of open gashes.
The desecration of hundreds of graves was a shanda, a shame, a ghoulish crime, he thought as he walked through Most Holy Trinity.
He did not know who would be so low as to steal monuments honoring the dead. But he wanted to do something about it.
His Mitzvah
The way humans mark graves has been evolving for millenniums. Homo naledi, an ancient hominin species, buried their dead in caves and engraved the walls. Ancient sheep herders in East Africa gouged out burial pits and placed large rocks over the corpses. The ancient Greeks used gold-lined chambers.
When Most Holy Trinity opened in 1851, for the German Catholic church in nearby Williamsburg, Brooklyn, nearly all the graves were marked with wooden crosses. The philosophy behind the simple markers was to show the living that in death, everyone was equal.
Eventually, Most Holy Trinity was filled with metal markers. They became popular in the United States during the late 1800s, thanks to the Monumental Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Conn. It manufactured them from what it described as “white bronze,” a cheaper alternative to stone with an elegant-sounding name. It was actually zinc — far less expensive than bronze but sturdy and resistant to rust. Past news stories about the cemetery suggest other markers were made of iron, a nearly worthless metal.
But at least some of the markers were copper, which can sell for up to $3 a pound and is often stolen from homes or businesses. In 1990, the police arrested two men trying to sneak away with three copper markers stashed in a shopping cart, according to a New York Daily News article.
Now, it seemed, someone had come for the rest.
The day after his discovery, Mr. Hirsch began making calls. Catholic Cemeteries, which maintains the burial ground for the Diocese of Brooklyn, referred him to a public relations manager who gave him little information. The desk officer at the 83rd Precinct, which covers the cemetery, told him the police knew of the theft but that no one had been arrested, Mr. Hirsch said.
The most recent thefts may have started in April, when the police received a complaint that the chain locking the front gate had been broken.
Nothing was reported stolen, but in July, the police got another report from the cemetery: Someone had stolen five metal markers. Five more were taken in August, the police said, then several more were taken in September, when cemetery managers met with the precinct’s commanding officer to talk about how to prevent more thefts. There have been no more thefts since, the police said.
Determined to learn the scope of the thefts, Mr. Hirsch, who uses a cane and struggles to walk long distances, returned last month to tally all the missing markers, recording them in a small notebook with a ballpoint pen.
So far, he said, he is at 1,300.
Mr. Hirsch could catalog the scope of the loss, but 1,300 markers were far too many for one man to replace. And the metal was gone for good — most likely run through a machine to disguise its origin and sold as scrap.
His devotion to the dead can seem extreme. But he calls his work a mitzvah. (A really big mitzvah, he says, adding an expletive).
About 18 years ago, thick poison ivy covered 64 headstones in Staten Island’s Baron Hirsch Cemetery, including the one belonging to Beckie Neubauer, a 19-year-old Austrian immigrant who died in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire.
For nearly 20 years, he has committed himself to honoring the lives of the 146 garment workers who died on March 25, 1911, when the fire ripped through the Greenwich Village factory, a disaster that exposed abhorrent working conditions, energized the labor movement and led to new workplace safety standards.
He has found victims’ relatives, some of whom did not even know they had any connection to the tragedy, and told them where their family members were buried.
After he found the ivy, he put on a protective suit, goggles, heavy gloves and booties and hacked away until it was cleared. It took about a week.
His work is taxing and even hazardous. But Mr. Hirsch, who never married and has no children, has the freedom to obsess over it. He trudges along, despite neuropathic pain that has made it harder for him to keep his balance, and back and neck aches that have slowed him down. He has fallen three times in cemeteries and worries that one day he will have a fatal fall or get struck by a crumbling headstone.
“It’s very easy to die in a cemetery,” he said.
A Reminder of the Dead
That day he discovered that Most Holy Trinity had been ransacked, Mr. Hirsch had come to visit the grave of another victim of the Triangle shirtwaist fire: Theresa Schmidt, a 32-year-old immigrant from Austro-Hungary.
Ms. Schmidt had never had a gravestone, according to Mr. Hirsch. So last April, he had bought a stone grave marker for her and had it installed.
Her marker remains where Mr. Hirsch left it. But Most Holy Trinity has lost a lot.
The theft “transcends decades,” said John Quaglione, a spokesman for the Diocese of Brooklyn. Thefts of markers have been happening since at least 1950, making it hard to calculate the total number of monuments that have been taken, Mr. Quaglione said.
That also means “communicating with family members can be difficult,” he said. “But we do work to keep a record of the vandalism as we are alerted to it.”
After the most recent spate, Catholic Cemeteries “coordinated with the N.Y.P.D. and hired private security,” he said. “We remain committed to preventing any form of vandalism on cemetery grounds.”
In the months since, Most Holy Trinity has become a walled city of the dead. Razor wire was installed over the fence that wraps around it, separating it from the adjoining Evergreens Cemetery, a 225-acre necropolis that is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Evergreens welcomes visitors for stargazing, and arborists lead tours among its dogwood, sweet gum and European weeping beech trees. Its ornate sculptures and elaborate mausoleums mark the graves of 538,000 people, including the tap dancer Bill Robinson, known as Bojangles; the jazz saxophonist Lester Young; and Martin Johnson Heade, a painter of the Hudson River School whose landscapes have sold for millions of dollars.
Over the razor wire, the permanent residents of Most Holy Trinity are largely unknown.
Mr. Hirsch hoped that the violation of Most Holy Trinity would remind New Yorkers not to forget the dead, to be outraged when their resting grounds are desecrated.
So, after calling the Diocese and the police, he began to get in touch with the descendants of the people buried at Most Holy Trinity.
A Family Marker
On Jan. 22, Mr. Hirsch called Stephen Pytko at his home on Long Island and asked him if he had relatives buried in Most Holy Trinity.
Mr. Pytko, bewildered, said yes.
I have some bad news, Mr. Hirsch told him.
The elegant marker that had once stood over his family plot was gone.
The monument had been a striking, blue-gray structure with the name Pytko written diagonally across the marker in large, gold-painted letters.
Mr. Hirsch had always admired how well-preserved it was and immediately noticed its absence because it was only a few feet away from the Schmidt marker.
Mr. Pytko was astonished to learn someone had stolen it.
“Who would do something like that, just for a few dollars?” he said.
On Jan. 27, he drove from Long Island with his wife, Linda, and his son, Andrew, to meet Mr. Hirsch at the cemetery.
Mr. Pytko had not been there since 1970, when he was 13, for the funeral of his aunt, Mary Pytko, who would make him heaping plates of pot roast or bowls of chicken soup when he visited her in Brooklyn.
Mr. Pytko followed Mr. Hirsch into the snow-covered cemetery. It was a long, steady walk from the stately brick entrance to the far corner of the cemetery, where the Pytko monument had once stood.
Leaning on his cane, Mr. Hirsch pointed at the razor wire.
“It looks like a prison camp,” he said.
Linda Pytko shook her head, devastated at the loss and disappointed that diocesan officials had not alerted the public.
The group trudged to the snow-encrusted burial site and stared down at the rectangular wooden frame, which once supported the marker engraved with Mr. Pytko’s relatives’ names: his grandparents, Joseph and Zophia; his uncle, John; and Mary, the last one buried at Most Holy Trinity.
The family bowed their heads, made the sign of the cross and prayed. The L train roared by, puncturing the silence.
Mr. Pytko then walked closer to the empty frame and peered inside, one thought repeating in his head: I should not have waited so long to return. When Mr. Hirsch was a little boy, Jewish cemeteries were packed with families visiting the dead during the High Holy Days. Now, he said, he rarely sees anyone standing at a grave.
But some days — days like this — Mr. Hirsch helps change that.
He is not done with Most Holy Trinity, though the recent snowfall slowed his hunt for missing markers. When the graveyard thaws, he said, he will be back out with his notebook, accounting for what the dead have lost.
He feels that someone has to.
The post When Grave Markers Are Stolen, He Speaks for the Dead appeared first on New York Times.
