Indianapolis, USA - A three-year project to create an online database of Indianapolis' Jewish cemeteries has yielded a trove of new information about the city's Jewish past, including a record of poorer ethnic immigrant groups whose synagogue was known simply as "the peddler's congregation."
Gloria Green, an office manager in a commercial real estate business, began collecting data after learning from a genealogy expert that there was no information readily available about people buried in Indianapolis' Kelly Street cemeteries.
That, she said, went against the Jewish respect for tradition, in this case, honoring the dead.
"A lot of Jews - they may not consider themselves religious, but they believe in the tradition that has followed for millenniums," she said. "When you see these stones and what's written on them, it just tears at the heart, the love that you see."
Green and volunteers sifted through handwritten congregational and mortuary records dating to 1935. They also scoured crowded rows of graves, searching for headstones whose birth and death dates are recorded according to the Hebrew calendar - the death year of a person who died in 1950 is listed as 5710.
What followed was a database of the 5,600 graves in the 11 Kelly Street cemeteries, where the city's Jewish community has been burying its dead for 150 years.
"The cemeteries are really some of the last intact pieces of the Jewish community that lived on the south side," said Jeannie Regan-Dinius, director of special initiatives for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.