What’s Wyatt Earp doing in a Jewish cemetery? That’s what was going through my mind as I stood in front of the famed lawman’s headstone last Sunday. I was at the Hills of Eternity, one of four Jewish cemeteries in Colma, on a seven-hour Memorial Day walk through eight of the town’s 17 cemeteries.
That’s a lot of dead — 1.5 million of them, according to city estimates. That’s a thousand bodies for every live resident. In addition to the four Jewish cemeteries there are others for Italians, Serbs, Greek Orthodox, Japanese, Chinese and Catholics, as well as several that don’t care where you’re from or how you prayed.
Colma was founded in 1924 as a necropolis, and is proud of its unofficial moniker, “City of Souls.” Burial societies began moving from San Francisco south to Colma in the late 1800s, well in advance of the 1912 city regulation that evicted all cemeteries to make room for urban growth.
On Jan. 1, 1889, San Francisco Congregation Emanu-El opened Home of Peace, the first Jewish cemetery in Colma. The congregation moved bodies and — for those who could afford it — headstones from its two San Francisco cemeteries, re-interring them at the new site. That same year, Congregation Sherith Israel moved its cemetery to the Hills of Eternity Memorial Park right next to Home of Peace. A five-minute walk away are Salem Memorial Park, established in 1877 in San Francisco and relocated to Colma in 1891; and Eternal Home Cemetery, set up in 1910.
Each of the four has its own character, reflecting the many layers of Jewish history in San Francisco and the Peninsula (Jews from the North and East tend to bury their dead closer to home). A curated walk like the one I took, run by the Sierra Club, gives a real sense of who lived here and how that changed over the years.
Take Wyatt Earp. Best known for his role in the 1881 gunfight in the O.K. Corral, where he, his two brothers and Doc Holliday outgunned a posse of stagecoach robbers, Earp died in Los Angeles in 1929, but was laid to rest here in the family plot belonging to his second wife, Josephine Sarah (Sadie) Marcus, a showgirl and denizen of a prominent San Francisco Jewish family. Her parents, Sophie and Human Marcus, lie just behind the grave she shares with Wyatt, keeping close watch over their wayward daughter.
Wyatt Earp is far from the only non-Jew buried in Colma’s Jewish cemeteries. Close scrutiny of the tombstones reveals more than a few Maries and O’Malleys, and there are ethnic Ukrainian family names in the Russian-language sections (look for those ending in “-chuk”). That, too, is an indelible part of our community’s history.
According to the Colma Historical Museum, which is definitely worth a visit, Earp’s grave gets 50 to 60 visitors a month, more than any other. But I’ll wager the late music impresario Bill Graham will soon outpace the legendary gunslinger, if he hasn’t already. Graham, a fixture of the San Francisco music scene who died in October 1991, lies buried in Eternal Home beneath a long, undulating black marble headstone inscribed with his Hebrew name, Volvel ben Yakov. Instead of the pebbles traditionally left behind by visitors, pilgrims to Graham’s resting site have placed pennies atop his headstone.
Home of Peace is where you find the grand above-ground tombs of San Francisco’s well-known Jewish families: Goldman, Sachs, Hellman, Fleishhacker. Levi Strauss is here, as is Adolph Sutro’s wife (but not him — all he gets is a plaque). And growing in number are the graves of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, often elaborately decorated with laser-cut portraits of the dead and verses of poetry. Interestingly, few of these headstones carry Hebrew writing, just Russian and English — another change in our ever-evolving Jewish community.
One of my favorites is the black marble headstone of Inna Volfenzon, which boasts a gorgeous skyline view of St. Petersburg, Russia, melting into the Golden Gate Bridge — testament to the long, arduous journey she and so many others made to arrive on these shores.
Sue Fishkoff is the editor of j., and can be reached at [email protected].