Cemetery at former Central Islip Psychiatric Center to be rededicated

A ceremony Friday rededicated the once-forgotten Central Islip Psychiatric Center cemetery, honoring the dead and showcasing recent improvements at the site. 

Between 1917 and 1998, roughly 5,500 patients  — including Holocaust survivors and military veterans, according to a former chaplain at the now closed hospital — were buried inside the grassy 16-acre gated plot abutting Touro Law Center’s campus on Eastview Drive. School officials began partnering with the state in 2013 to restore the cemetery, which had fallen into disrepair after the hospital closed in 1996. The state's Office of Mental Health has funded and performed much of the work. 

To comply with state privacy laws, most graves bear only numbers, said James Plastiras, a spokesman for the state office. He said the office keeps a list of patients buried at the cemetery. Generally, he said, records are typically kept at the office's central repository or at a Psychiatric Center near to the cemetery. 

In 2002, the office began "assessing and addressing cemeteries at our open and closed hospitals. Since many of the cemeteries are located at closed hospital sites, the challenge of maintaining the cemeteries slowed some of the restoration progress, and much of the work was done on a voluntary basis by OMH staff," Plastiras said. 

Samuel Levine, a Touro law professor and director of the school's Jewish Law Institute, said many of those buried there “were not treated with the kindness that they should have been treated [with] when they were alive, and they were not treated with appropriate kindness when they passed."

School and state officials and Central Islip civic leaders were expected to attend the ceremony, along with members of veterans groups and Port Jefferson Station’s North Shore Jewish Center Men’s Club, which has sent a delegation of members to the cemetery yearly since the early 1990s to recite kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

Early restoration included removing discarded wine bottles and mattresses. More recent work included removing brush to make the cemetery visible from Eastview Drive and from the campus, along with the installation this spring of a historical plaque and a stand-alone marker.

The marker describes a “potter’s field which is the final resting place of 5,500 souls,” some unclaimed by their relatives or without families. Built in two sections, nondenominational and Jewish, the cemetery was active from the late 19th century until the hospital’s closing. 

Newsday has reported that the hospital housed, at its peak in the early 1960s, as many as 12,000 patients. It was part of a network of about 50 public institutions that included Kings Park and Brentwood’s Pilgrim State and dominated psychiatric care in the state for much of the 20th century. After budgetary shortfalls and revelations of poor conditions at some facilities scandalized the public in the early 1970s, many sites curtailed operations or closed. 

Rabbi Melvyn Lerer, a former Pilgrim chaplain who also served Jewish patients at Central Islip, said in an oral history that some of those buried at the cemetery survived concentration camps.

He told Newsday last year that he was appalled by cemetery conditions at the first funeral he officiated there in the 1970s.

Touro officials have fielded about 10 to 15 inquiries from families trying to locate the graves of relatives or ancestors they believe are buried in the cemetery, Levine said. The school passes those inquiries on to the state’s Office of Mental Health, which maintains the cemetery and its records. A spokesman for the office did not immediately comment. 

Men’s Club president Benjamin Etkin, a Stony Brook University staffer, said that the prayer his group recites at the cemetery would typically be said by a close relative, but many buried there “had no one to pray for them. Many of these people were left there by their families.” 

Etkin said he hoped the Friday ceremony would “keep this in the spotlight” and encourage more families to place name plates on the cemetery’s grave markers.

Nancy Manfredonia, special projects coordinator for Central Islip Civic Council, plans to include the cemetery on a historic walking trail of the area that will open next year. At its peak, the hospital, which went by different names over the years, employed 2,500 people, she said, drawing workers from Ireland and the American South. The jobs “didn’t pay a lot, but it was steady, good work” that came with a pension. Hospital amenities like ballfields, bowling and a performance stage made it a community gathering place. Those memories are still a source of pride for former employees living in the area, she said.    

Benjamin Pomerance, deputy commissioner for program development for the state’s Department of Veterans’ Services, said his agency supported the historical markers, which make general mention of the veterans buried at the cemetery.

“We don’t want any veteran to be laid to rest and not remembered for who they were and how they served,” he said. “Memorializing the graves could start important conversations about mental health, reduce the stigma and promote access to support services for those who might be struggling.”   

For Levine and his colleagues, the restoration is an act of neighborliness and one demanded by the Jewish teachings at the heart of Touro's mission.

“There is a definite religious obligation, and it goes back to the origins: Abraham made sure to bury Sarah, to purchase a plot of land to show his respect.”