When the first Catholic, Jewish and Protestant cemeteries in Los Angeles were abandoned by 1910, the displaced dead were scattered to other cemeteries. But not all were found and reburied.
According to the history
, the first Jewish settlers arrived in the tiny, Wild West pueblo of Los Angeles in the late 1840s. In 1851 (the year after California became an American state), census workers recorded eight Jewish citizens in Los Angeles, a town of roughly 1,600 souls. “All of them were bachelors who lived in their stores on the ground floor of the city’s lead commercial building, a two-story structure located at the southeast corner of Aliso and Los Angeles Streets,” writes historian William M. Kramer.
The men were not single for long, and soon the Jewish population rose to around 60, including women and children. This increase in population presented pressing issues. There were charitable needs and religious services to be organized, and there was also the need for a burial ground that was not Catholic or Protestant.