Frances Klein, Member of the Jewish Community Cemetery Association
The Jewish Community Cemetery Association was created in 1947 to provide a Jewish burial place for multiple Wilmington organizations in part of the Lombardy Cemetery, located on Foulk Road. The three current sections—Beth Shalom, Adas Kodesh Shel Emeth, and Montefiore—each appoint directors to a board to oversee the administration. The JCCA Board then has the responsibility of hiring a manager and financial secretary to run the day-to-day operation.
For the past 35 years, the cemetery manager has been Stephen Michlin, often seen walking the grounds of the cemetery with various contractors as he supervised the care of the grounds, one of his numerous managerial responsibilities. Steve was the “go to” person when a member of the community wanted to purchase a cemetery plot, pulling a huge, multi–folded, paper map of the cemetery grounds out of his back pocket. The map was filled with rows of hundreds of plots, in a system Steve could interpret better than anyone else in the community. Not only would he walk you over to the available spots, but provide gems of community history.
Steve, a native Wilmingtonian, enlisted in the Navy right out of high school. During his tour of duty, he was based in Hawaii at Pearl Harbor, and traveled during his three years of service to the Philippines, Japan, and Hong Kong. Upon his return to Wilmington, he worked for a couple of years as an electrician apprentice and for a tree cutting service until he took a sales job at Sears where he stayed for 20 years. He was offered a retirement package at that point and decided to take a year off to be with his kids. At some point during this time, he ran into his old childhood friend, Alan Schoenberg. Alan needed help at Schoenberg Memorial Chapel, and he offered Steve a part time job. Steve agreed to help out his old friend and, eventually, a part–time job turned into a full–time position. In addition, the Jewish Community Cemetery was in need of a manager, and Steve agreed to take on this position as well.
Steve enjoyed the personal connections he made with people, and his job enabled him to accomplish an important service for the community. He felt strongly about honoring the deceased person by taking care of them with respect as well as comforting their family. Steve’s managerial responsibilities were wide ranging, including hiring and supervising landscapers, snow removers, grave diggers, walkway and road maintenance, underground water issues, tree work, and monument maintenance. Steve worked at his position at the cemetery 24/7 for over 30 years, hesitating to retire until he felt he could leave his work in good hands.
The JCCA was very fortunate to find Josh Cohn, a data scientist and engineer, to take over as cemetery manager this spring. Originally from New York, Josh was willing to move to Wilmington for this position, in part because it gave him the opportunity of being close to family. Working with Stephen and Sandy Seidel—the JCCA Financial Secretary—Josh is quickly learning the details of cemetery management. His data design and analytic skills have been invaluable to the improvement of record keeping and data access for the cemetery. He has already created an ambitious multi-step plan, “Project Roadmap 2025,” to achieve these goals. Step one, already being implemented, is auditing information on each person interred at the cemetery and entering data into a digital base. Josh walks the cemetery, updating information, as well as recording latitude and longitude positions of graves which will enable digital mapping of the cemetery. Step two is the creation of a website, which will enable visitors to find grave information and location of any deceased person within the cemetery. Preliminary work has already begun. Further steps in the Roadmap include linking headstone images to the graves and expanding the data available to the public through the website. We are indeed fortunate to have had Stephen Michlin for so many dedicated years and now to have Josh Cohn taking us into the future.
Also retiring this year, is the Montefiore recording Secretary, Jeff Lew. Volunteering for many years to keep accurate and detailed burial records for members of the Montefiore Society, his dedication to his position will be sorely missed.
