ADAT Shalom Memorial Park

Courtney Shafer picks up litter at Hebrew Memorial Park in Livonia. She says fighting weeds and trash are a constant battle for the grounds crew.Courtney Shafer has a thankless job. She spends her work week caring for the grounds at Hebrew Memorial Park, yet all she’s likely to hear from visitors are complaints: There are weeds around my mother’s grave; there’s litter on the grounds.Barbara Kohler of West Bloomfield is one of those dissatisfied visitors.“I was there on Father’s Day and I was very upset at how it looked,” said Kohler, whose father, Aaron Friedman, died in 2012; her mother, Dolly Friedman, passed in 2013. Kohler said their graves were surrounded by numerous weeds. She documented through photographs other gravesites in need of weeding as well as graves with neglected water bottles.This summer has been particularly bad for weeds, said Shafer, part of a grounds crew of 18 who maintain the cemetery at 14 Mile and Gratiot in Clinton Township.With 26,000 graves (11,000 without perpetual care), Hebrew Memorial is the largest of the Detroit area’s Jewish cemeteries.Every day, Shafer and her colleagues move through the cemetery pulling weeds and piling them at the nearest roadside, where they’re picked up by the tractor crew, which also handles the mowing.In addition to the weeds, they have to contend with trash that blows in from the busy Gratiot Avenue commercial strip nearby. Sometimes visitors themselves leave trash, Shafer said.“My attitude is if my parents were buried here, I’d want it to look nice, so I do my best,” she said.“We can’t do everything instantaneously,” said Rabbi Boruch Levin, executive director of the Hebrew Benevolent Society. The society operates the Hebrew Memorial Park and several smaller cemeteries.If people visit in spring, their loved one’s grave may not be yet planted with flowers. Fighting weeds is an ongoing battle, and it takes about a month for the workers to get through the entire cemetery. By the time the grounds crew makes its way through the entire prope... (The Jewish News)

The full letter is posted at the end of this story.)A May 18 concert by internationally known Israeli singer/songwriter Achinoam Nini, known as Noa, was canceled last Thursday by Adat Shalom Synagogue in Farmington Hills. In a letter to its membership, synagogue leadership cited security threats as the reason for its decision to cancel.“We have been working closely with law enforcement and our security advisers and have concluded that, based on these threats, there was a high potential for disruption to the concert,” the letter states. “In keeping the safety of our community, our congregation and the performers as our highest priority, we have made the decision to cancel the concert.”Adat Shalom Executive Director Alan Yost told the JN, “When we booked Noa, our sole intent was to provide Adat Shalom members as well as the Detroit Jewish community with an evening of quality entertainment by an internationally recognized Israeli entertainer. We knew she was clearly left-of-center in her political views. That wasn’t an issue because we were looking to provide an incredible performer.”Alan YostYost says when Adat Shalom reached out to some Zionist organizations for help in promoting the concert, they declined to participate because of Noa’s political views. The JN was the media sponsor for the concert.“We respected that,” Yost said, “and we decided to continue on. Then we began to receive a lot of phone calls from individuals voicing significant displeasure with Noa’s appearance based on her political views and her ‘anti-Israel’ posture.“Synagogue officers had a couple of conversations with a couple of individuals to get a feel for what they were looking for. They were communicating that the only thing acceptable to them as individuals was to cancel the concert; if not, [there would be the] possibility of protests, demonstrations and disruptions of the concert. This was a constant theme.”From the conversations, Yost says, there was nothing on the level of a bomb threat and no use of the word “violent,... (The Jewish News)