The ISRAELITIC SOCIETY PETITION DOCUMENT, a request for a burial space, made to the CLEVELAND CITY COUNCIL in 1840 represents the first communal undertaking by the Jewish community in Cleveland . The document, composed by Jewish community leaders, all recent immigrants, highlights how the city developed and how immigrant groups managed their culturally specific needs.
Jewish settlers arrived in Northeast Ohio in the 1830s; a group from Unsleben, Bavaria, and settled in Cleveland in the summer of 1839. These pioneers established the Israelitic Society, recognized as the city’s first Jewish congregation. On April 1, 1840, less than a year since their arrival in Cleveland, Jewish community leaders petitioned Cleveland City Council for a Jewish section of the city cemetery on ERIE STREET (now East Ninth Street). This petition is the oldest known document produced by the city’s Jewish community. The well-known ALSBACHER DOCUMENT, an ethical will given to Moses Alsbacher upon his departure for Cleveland by Lazarus Kohn, a religious teacher in Unsleben, encouraged those who left Unsleben to remember their identity as Jews in the new land of America. The 1840 petition was an effort to adapt Jewish religious practice to a new environment, an explicit response to Kohn’s exhortation to “remain good Jews”.
The Jews of Unsleben did not have their own Jewish cemetery and would not have one until 1856. The town’s Jewish dead were laid to rest in the Jewish cemetery of Kleinbardorf, about fifteen miles to the southeast. But there was no Jewish cemetery within a day’s travel (forty miles) away from Cleveland. The Jewish section of the local cemetery would thus serve many throughout the region. When Jewish community leaders learned that the city cemetery on Erie Street would be adding eight acres of burial sites, they hired a 'scrivener' (a writer of legal documents and letters to courts) to write a petition to City Council asking for a half-acre Jewish section. The leaders and many members of the Israelitic Society, seventeen in all, signed the document dated April 1, 1840.
The petition explained the need for a burial ground separate from those of other “persuasions” and requesting that one-half acre be set aside for use by the Jewish community as a communal burial ground. Community leaders had unsuccessfully sought to purchase land for a burial ground elsewhere but had been turned down because of a concern that the establishment of too many burial grounds could harm the value of neighboring property. The community would be denied again. City Council’s Committee on Public Grounds deemed the request “inexpedient”. The city's focus was to make its cemetery a benefit for as many Cleveland families as possible and had restricted the sale of burial plots to persons or families, with a six-grave limit. Allowing an organization to buy a large section would violate that policy. To grant the half-acre the Israelitic Society requested would mean declining more than eighty requests for family plots. Perhaps the newly-arrived Israelites were not aware of this city policy, for no other organization petitioned for burial space.
The Israelitic Society resumed its search for a burial ground and by July found one, the WILLET STREET CEMETERY in OHIO CITY. Though only small fraction of the city’s total population (less than fifty of just over 6,000 residents in 1840), the Jewish community nonetheless took steps to meet their own needs while working within the structures of local government. Chief City Archivist for Cleveland City Council Martin Hauserman brought the document to the attention of local historian Arnold Berger in 2017. Hauserman’s successor, Chuck Mocsiran, assisted Berger with research on the history of the document and local cemeteries.