Jewish Cemeteries of Greater Cincinnati Dedicates New Cemetery in Loveland

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(June 5, 2017 – – Cincinnati, OH) Jewish Cemeteries of Greater Cincinnati (“JCGC”) is pleased to announce that it held a ceremony to dedicate its new 23 acre cemetery in Loveland on Sunday, June 4th. Josh Shapiro, Board president of JCGC, served as the Master of Ceremonies. He expressed his gratitude to the Jewish Foundation, the JCGC Board of Trustees, the congregational rabbis and JCGC’s “Friends” and “Guardians” donors for their support. He also thanked the architect, McGill Smith Punshon, and the general contractor, JDL Warm, for their good work. “We are pleased to be dedicating this new 23 acre community cemetery which will provide enough burial space to meet the entire community’s needs for at least the next 100 years,” stated Mr. Shapiro.

Other speakers on the program included Mary Wolf, Vice Chair of the Miami Township Board of Trustees, Bob Weil of Weil Funeral Home, Tovah Kirschner of the Chevra Kadisha, Aubrey Meyer, a Xavier University student and an integral leader in their Center for Interfaith Community Engagement, and Beth Guttman, President of the Jewish Foundation, a major supporter of JCGC. The ceremony closed with services conducted by the congregational rabbis to dedicate the initial Reform, Conservative and Orthodox sections of the cemetery. Rabbis Sigma Faye Coran, Ezra Goldschmiedt, Lewis Kamrass, Yisroel Kaufman, Stuart Lavenda, David Spetner, Avrohom Weinrib and Irvin Wise participated in the services.

JCGC is a unique community organization that owns and manages 23 cemeteries in addition to the new Loveland Cemetery. In the early 2000s the leaders of these 23 cemeteries became part of a working group formed to address common problems. This group included members of the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox communities, as well as representatives of the Jewish Foundation and Jewish Federation. The work of this group, supported by a generous commitment from the Jewish Foundation, ultimately resulted in the formation of JCGC. Putting all the Greater Cincinnati Jewish cemeteries under one roof starting in 2008 enabled them to address their most pressing needs: meeting the sustainability and succession challenges they were all facing, and locating and purchasing land for a new cemetery to meet the growing demand for burials in Cincinnati’s Northeast Corridor. Cincinnati is a leader nationally in creating this type of efficient organizational model to take care of its cemeteries in perpetuity.

More information is available at http://jcemcin.org , or by calling 513-961-0178