Israel Benevolent Society Cemetery

Consecrated in eighteen forty-four, the Israel Benevolent Society Cemetery in Chambersburg holds a quiet distinction: it is the first Jewish cemetery established west of Philadelphia. Founded by a Chevrah Kaddishah, meaning Holy Burial Society in Hebrew, it served Jewish settlers moving westward in the great migration of the mid-nineteenth century. Among those buried here is Isaac Burgauer, the only known Southern Jewish casualty of the Battle of Gettysburg to be interred in a Northern Jewish cemetery.

That detail alone speaks to the complexity of Jewish life in Civil War America, communities on both sides of the conflict bound by faith and divided by geography. The cemetery remains a rare early document of Jewish community life in south-central Pennsylvania.