Tucked next to Capital High School, the Home of Peace Cemetery is one of Helena’s most special treasures.
It is not only Helena’s oldest active cemetery, but also Montana’s oldest active Jewish cemetery and a lovely memorial to an important ethnic group. The pioneers buried there forged new lives on the Western frontier and helped lay the cornerstones upon which Montana’s capital city rests.
Helena’s Jewish community formed the Hebrew Benevolent Society in 1866 and established the cemetery in 1867. The wrought iron fence, still intact, dates to that very early time. Emanuel Blum was the first to be buried at the Home of Peace. He died in 1865, before there was a Jewish burial ground, and so he was first interred in the City Cemetery where Central School is today. His remains were moved to the Home of Peace in 1867. Blum’s grave and the next nine burials lie unmarked, north of the modern chain link fence, outside the cemetery’s tended grounds. Merchant Solomon Content, who built Content’s Corner in Virginia City in 1864, was in Helena when he died in 1870 and is among these first 10 interments.
There are a number of unmarked graves, but the oldest surviving tombstone is that of Hattie Jacobs, who died in 1873. Pioneers buried in the Home of Peace include hotel proprietors Samuel Schwab and Marcus Lissner, dry goods merchant Moses Morris, clothiers Herman Gans and Jacob Feldberg, and cattleman Louis Kaufman. The diverse contributions and optimistic ventures of these and other Helena Jews helped the gold camp emerge from a frontier settlement to a permanent community. Also buried in the cemetery are vigilante Ben Ezekiel, who stood sentinel during the George Ives trial in Nevada City in 1863 and 20th-century criminal trial lawyer and esteemed judge Lester Henry Loble.
Prominent women buried in the Home of Peace include teacher Dorothy Silverman and the much-beloved Helena sisters and suffragists Belle Fligelman Winestine and Frieda Fligelman. Josephine Hepner was prominent in the Miriam Chapter, Order of the Eastern Star, and with her husband, Sol, helped found Helena’s Masonic Home.
The Jewish community was close knit, and the Home of Peace mirrors these relationships. Family plots neatly cluster much like a neighborhood, with households bound together by stone curbing. Unusual brick pathways simulate streets. The avenue of cottonwood trees along the driveway was planted in 1910. In 1911, Alice Gans gave $1,000 for the perpetual care of the graves of Morris Sands, Leopold Marks and her late husband, Herman Gans. This money likely paid for the stone entry and gates.
The Jewish community anticipated its numbers would increase. Although Montana’s larger Jewish community is now resurging, the need for cemetery expansion has not come to pass. The tangled vegetation of undeveloped land to the north attests to this. Original 1867 fencing still encloses much of it. After 1900, there were few job opportunities in Helena beyond joining family businesses. Many second-generation Jews left for other places. Marriages between Jews and Gentiles among Helena families became more frequent and the cemetery relaxed its strict rules. In 1916, the Board of Trustees agreed not only to permit the burials of Gentiles linked in legal marriage to Jews and their unmarried children, but also to allow non-Jewish funerals. This practice continues today.
From the Helena Independent Record