Machpelah Cemetery

Machpelah Cemetery was founded in 1855, making it well over 150 years old. By the late 1980s, the cemetery was abandoned to the state. Its board had run out of money, and its grounds had become neglected an “impassable jungle.” Machpelah’s imposing 1928 entrance building on Cypress Hills Street deteriorated with the cemetery’s decline, its offices ransacked, and the cemetery’s records scattered around the inside and demolished in 2013. The cemetery is known to be poorly maintained, relatively unkept, and nothing like its former glory.