Saturday class is NOT what you think!

Tripod MHPCP used to hold
up gravestones

 Class on a Saturday?! As dreadful as that may sound for most students, it is not what someone would think.  On Saturday September 28th, 2019, my professor was able to set up a tour for our class to the oldest Jewish cemetery in the south and one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in America! The cemetery belongs to the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue on Hassle Street in Charleston, SC . The cemetery is surrounded by a wall and when you drive by you would not expect there to be a cemetery back there. 

One of the stones Monica was
 working on

Ghost of Jewish Cemetery

We were able to meet with two officials of the cemetery, Anita Moise Rosenberg and Randi Serrins. They told us all about the rich history within the graveyard and even a ghost story. At the gravesite there was a student in the Clemson / Charleston historic preservation and conservation masters program, Monica Hendricks, who was working on gravestones. I am majoring in historic preservation and conservation so I decided to talk to her during our visit about what she was doing in the graveyard, which was very interesting. Due to many natural disasters and over time gravestones start to deteriorate, and in order to restore them people in the historic preservation field restore these stones. Monica was showing me how she was working on the stones, and she has an internship and works with Anita Rosenberg and Randi Serrins to restore the stones. Anita Rosenberg told us about how "each gravestone tells a different story to the person who has passed", for example smaller gravestones belong to young children and stones with a pillar and the top cut off symbolizes a great "warrior" who has fallen. As we were walking around the graveyard, Anita and I stepped off to the side to discuss more about the restoration process in a graveyard, and she gave an example of a section of the graveyard which was sectioned off for a family and costed about $14,000 to restore, which blew my mind because the section was no bigger than a dorm bedroom. 

Gravestone