Burial

The Jewish sections at Mount Hope Cemetery are legally owned by Sinai Temple and managed by a committee appointed by the their Board of Trustees; however, the land is held in stewardship for the entire Jewish community.

Pioneer life was not easy, therefore it is not surprising that the first group organized by the small Jewish community in Champaign-Urbana was Ahavat Achim, Brotherly Love, a memorial society. A group of nineteen men, the majority of whom were single, met in the home of Max Eichberg in October 1867 to establish a support network that would assist them in the case of illness or death. Members agreed to contribute equally to the purchase of land for a cemetery and to provide support in the event of a death through attendance at the funeral, saying Kaddish, and holding three days of prayer meetings at the mourner’s house.

Mount Hope Cemetery, Champaign, was established in 1856. Planned in the tradition of the rural cemeteries that became popular in the 1830s, Mount Hope was seen by its developers as an “ornament” to the towns with a quarter of the profits from the sale of burial plots allocated to improvements of the grounds through plantings of flowers and trees and installation of fences.

Hattie Kahn, the infant daughter of Nathan and Hanna Kahn, who died on August 1, 1870 is the oldest known Jewish burial in Champaign County. The Kahns lived in Mattoon and their daughter’s burial in Urbana shows the reach of the rural Midwestern Jewish community.

Champaign Daily Gazette, March 11, 1899

In the summer of 1868, Ahavat Achim purchased land a mile north of Urbana for their cemetery for $200.00. Known as the Old Jewish Cemetery it was once located east of Cunningham Avenue near the present site of East Lawn Burial Park. In March 1887, Ahavat Achim merged with Grand Prairie Lodge 281 of B’nai B’rith, a Jewish service organization that was formed in Champaign-Urbana in 1877. At this time B’nai B’rith took over management of the cemetery. In November 1898, they proposed moving the Jewish Cemetery to a section within Mount Hope Cemetery in Champaign.

On 14 March 1899, 21 8-plot lots were purchased by the B’nai B’rith Lodge from Mount Hope for $300.00. Mount Hope Cemetery records indicate that 15 of the burials in this new section were reburials from the Old Jewish Cemetery in Urbana. The old cemetery was then closed. Since 1899, the majority of Jewish burials in Champaign County have been in Mount Hope. The special Jewish sections of Mount Hope have served the Sinai Temple Congregation (est. in 1904 as Champaign-Urbana Hebrew Congregation), Congregation B’nai Israel (active 1912-1954), the University of Illinois Hillel Foundation (est. 1923), and unaffiliated Jews in C-U and nearby communities.