There are five yahrzeit plaques memorializing the deceased members of our community and their loved ones.  Two of them were donated during time periods for which few records survive, but for three of them I have been able to find documentation of their origins.

Note the yahrzeit plaques symmetrically arranged, alternating with the stained glass windows.  THANK G-D FOR SYMMETRY.

It took more than half a century for the shul to get its first yahrzeit plaque.  The process began at the June 1943 board meeting when the son of Sam Rosenthal, who died during his term as the congregation’s treasurer, requested that his mother be permitted to donate a yahrzeit tablet in her husband’s name and reserve spaces for six members of their family.  A committee was appointed to discuss the matter, and at the next board meeting they pronounced their verdict that Mrs. Rosenthal’s generous offer had a fatal flaw:  lack of symmetry.  A month later, “the Secretary was requested to write to Mrs. Sam Rosenthal in regards to her offer of a Yaliszeit (sic) Tablet, advising that the Cong will accept two tablets and place one on each side of the Uren Kodesh, with all necessary electric wire connections.  If she wishes to donate one tablet only, the Cong will accept same and place it either in the Vestibule or in the Vestry Room temporary to the time when someone will donate a second Tablet, at which time, the two tablets will then be placed in the synagogue on each side of the Uren Kodesh.”

What happened next is unclear, but the December board meeting minutes mention the donation of not one, but two memorial tablets — the original one from Mrs. Sam Rosenthal and a second one from Mr. Sam Gordon.  Problem solved!  And better yet, the officers anticipated $1500 from the sale of all the available spaces!  At that time both tablets had been received and were ready to be installed, but then there was some sort of hitch — in the March board meeting a “motion was made to see Mr Max Lazar in regards to the tablet, and obtain the parts which are in his possession, to complete the donors names on same.”  A month later there was still no decision on when to dedicate the tablets, and perhaps things still continued to drag on, because during the July 1944 board meeting the “sec’y was requested to write a letter to Mrs Sam Rosenthal, assuring her that the Donor plate on the tablet will be attached as soon as the war will be over, during the war no brass is obtainable.”  Soon, name plates began to be sold for $50 each.

Two of the names on the Gordon yahrzeit tablet have Jewish stars next to them — the only names so marked on all of the tablets.  The meeting minutes record why:  In March 1945 the AZA made a contribution of $20 for a name plate in memory of Wilbert Newman, a charter member of the Homestead AZA, and in July, Fred Kaminsky, the advisor of the AZA, made another $20 for a name plate in memory of Milton Jackson.  These boys were two of the six Jewish Homesteaders killed in action during WWII (all of their names are listed here).  At a later date a plaque was purchased for the third of these boys, Jerome Solomon, but his plaque did not get a Jewish star marker.

The sanctuary c. 1954. Look how ghastly it looks with the unbalanced Averbach tablet. If only some other family would come along to donate another… (source)

The third of the shul’s yahrzeit tablets came up for discussion at the November 1947 board meeting when Victor Averbach, on behalf of his father and other members of his family, expressed their wish to contribute one in memory of “their departed dear one Rachael Averbach.”  Little was recorded about the ensuing conversations.  This tablet is significantly bigger than the previous two, so they made no demands for a second one and installed just the one at the front of the synagogue.  As of April 1949, the wires still hadn’t been connected to it, though in September of 1948 Victor Averbach resigned from the synagogue (not without confirming his family would still get the six plates on the memorial tablet they had presented).

The next time the tablets came up in the meeting minutes was on June 1, 1949, less than a week after the death of the rabbi’s twenty-five year-old daughter, Yetta Weiss.  A leader of the Young Lions Club of Young Judea in Munhall, she had made aliyah in December 1948 to work under the auspices of Hechalutz.  In late May she died suddenly in Tel Aviv after a short illness, and the congregation decided to place a plaque on the tablet in her memory.  The next motion?  “Motion made by I. Glick, seconded by Louis Fisher that the Congregation place plaques on the memorial tablet in memory of Rabbi and Mrs. Samuel Widom.”  That sad chapter of their history was never far from the minds of those who had lived through it twenty-five years prior…

Not all of the yahrzeits commemorated were people who lived in Homestead.  The earliest ones appear to memorialize long-deceased family members of Homesteaders in the shul where they said kaddish for them.  One couple who died on the same day in January 1943, Motke and Taube Lipshitz, caught my eye as possibly having  been murdered in the Shoah. Unfortunately I am unable to trace them or which Homesteader wished to memorialize them.  Update 7/26/2016:  I believe they are the parents of Esther Pearlstein, wife of David Pearlstein, whose name appears near theirs.  (Esther lived until 1998.)

Every person on all of these plaques has a story.  Many of the names are now familiar to me from the individuals and families I’ve been researching since August.  Most familiar, of course, are those of my own relatives, all of which are on the fourth tablet, which my grandfather and his siblings gave in memory of their parents probably in the late 1950s.  This tablet is the one which brought belated balance to the front of the shul.  Given the later dates of all the people it contains, I suspect many of you have close connections to others on this tablet, too — likewise the last tablet, erected by the Zukerman family in January 1985, though no names appeared on it until at least 1993.  The five tablets are nearly entirely filled; if any of us wishes to add more names, it won’t be long until someone will need to donate a new one.

Photograph of the destroyed Homestead Hebrew Chapel in Beth Shalom (from 10/17/96 Chronicle). You can make out the melted yahrzeit plaques on either side.

Their present setting in Beth Shalom is much more heimishe.  As many of you know, the original plaques were hung in the synagogue’s cozy Homestead Hebrew Chapel, which was created for them and the shul’s ark in ’93 or ’94, but all of these items and other Homestead Judaica were destroyed in the October 1996 fire.  Replicas of the original tablets donated by Ed Balis hang on the walls of the rebuilt chapel, which is where Beth Shalom has minyan during the week.  It’s this room where people saying kaddish begin to heal.  For that reason, a new Pittsburgh friend of mine confessed to me, she had her mother’s yahrzeit plaque added to one of the Homestead tablets, though she had no connection to our community. 

The first time I saw these plaques was in September after Shabbat morning services.  The research I was doing at the time was focused on the early years when many of these men and women were at their prime, actively shaping the young congregation’s future.  It felt to me as though I were skipping ahead to the end of the book, discovering with a shock that all of my favorite characters ended up dead.   Such is life.  But through these plaques, they are not forgotten.

The pictures of the original tablets were taken in late 1992 or early 1993 by Lockwood Hoehl before the shul was sold.  The pictures of the remade tablets were taken by me in September 2014.  All of the pictures are viewable below; click on the first one to enter a slideshow with all of them.  After the pictures are transcriptions of all of the names and dates.  Thank you to Lynn Saul for doing all of these transcriptions — a tremendous amount of tedious work.  You can use your web browser to search this page to locate names of your family members.  (These transcriptions will also be added to JewishGen’s Memorial Plaques Database to make this information readily findable to genealogists with Homestead ancestry.)