Children's Graves at the Jewish Cemetery, Victoria BC

We did our monument analysis at the Jewish Cemetery in Victoria at the corner of Fernwood Rd. and Cedar Hill Rd. We decided to narrow our focus to include the graves of children in the cemetery. There are six children buried in the Jewish Cemetery: Adele Meiss (6 months old), Grace Meiss (2 years and 10 months old), Rebecca Harris (6 months old), Annie Moss (under 1 year old), George Lancaster (4 months old), Issac A. Fried (9 years old).


View Anthropolgy 392 Memorial Project in a larger map

In doing the project, we asked the following 3 research questions:

1. Why are there so few child graves in the Jewish Cemetery?
2. Why was the last child interred in 1916 when the cemetery has been in constant use until the present?
3. Where are the rest of the children buried?

We had a number of ideas about what might be the answers to these questions, and were able to confirm them fairly confidently. To do this we contacted a member of Victoria's Jewish community, Rabbi Kaplan. We found this to be an effective way of addressing our questions about children in the Jewish Cemetery.

Initially we hypothesized that the low number of child interments, and the fact that the most recent one is dated 1916, is likely due to the fact that infant mortality rates have declined quite a bit over the past century. As shown by Statistics Canada, since 1926 infant mortality has dropped from over a hundred to around five children per 1,000 (Statistics Canada 2007). Furthermore, there is not a huge population of Jewish people in Victoria today so the likelihood of a child dieing and being Jewish is fairly low.

Rabbi Kaplan was able to confirm what we initially thought about child graves in the Jewish Cemetery, and to give us some more detailed information. He explained that, since Victoria's Jewish population is so small, many of the Jewish people in Victoria have extended family in some of Canada's larger cities (and I would assume even abroad) where a child's body would be sent to be buried so as not to be buried in a cemetery without any relatives. This can be considered alongside the Jewish Federations and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism websites' pages about death practices, which describe mourning as a community practice (Jewish Federations of North America 2011, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism 2010). Furthermore, only about 10 people are buried in Victoria's Jewish Cemetery per year and these are usually adults who have strong roots or connections in Victoria, and whose families see no need to send their bodies elsewhere.

Through looking at the children's graves at the Victoria Jewish Cemetery, discussing what questions they brought to mind for us, and contacting a member of Victoria's Jewish community, our group was able to carry out our small project to the end that we answered our research questions fairly definitively. In the end we were able to confirm that not many children have been buried in the cemetery, and none since 1916, because of dropping infant mortality rates and a small Jewish community in Victoria.

Bibliography:

The Jewish Federations of North America
2011 Jewish Funeral Customs: Saying Goodbye to a Loved One. http://www.jewishfederations.org/page.aspx?id=937, accessed February 11, 2011.

Statistics Canada
2007 Infant, Neonatal and Early Neonatal Mortality Rates in Canada, 1926-2005. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/91-003-x/2007001/figures/4129861-eng.htm, accessed February 11, 2011.

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
2010 Guide to Jewish Funeral Practice. http://www.uscj.org/guide_to_jewish_fune6211.html, accessed February 11, 2011.