Prayer service held for 'forgotten' Jewish psychiatric patients buried in Central Islip

About two dozen people gathered Sunday morning around the gravestone of Helen Zimmerman to say a prayer for her and roughly 100 other Jewish patients buried decades ago at the former Central Islip Psychiatric Center.

More than 5,000 patients at the hospital, which housed mentally ill people for more than a century, from 1889 until it closed in 1998, were buried in the hospital’s cemetery. Most of the graves are marked with a small stone set in the ground and inscribed only with a number.

The group had come to the cemetery Sunday "to remember the people who were forgotten tragically in their life," said Samuel Levine, a professor at the Touro Law Center, which stands on the grounds of the former hospital.

"We are trying to remedy that — to show they are not forgotten," said Levine, who recited the Kaddish, a Jewish prayer of mourning, at the graveside service.

The facility was one of four state mental hospitals on Long Island, which at their height in the 1950s and 1960s, together cared for roughly 37,000 patients, most from New York City, according to Louise Harmon, professor emeritus at Touro.

Treatments at Central Islip, like many psychiatric hospitals of the time, included later discredited methods like electroshock, lobotomies and strong antipsychotic drugs, according to Harmon's historical account of the psychiatric hospital published in 2018.

Some patients lived at the hospital nearly their whole lives.

Alan Meisel, 75, of Setauket, who attended Sunday's service, was a psychiatrist at the hospital for 30 years, until it closed, mainly providing outpatient care. He recalls one patient who died in the late 1970s and had been at the institution since the 1910s.

They often died alone.

At the gravesite, Levine recalled how Rabbi Melvyn Lerer, a chaplain at the hospital from the late 1970s until it shut down, told him that when he officiated at the burials of his congregants, the rabbi and the gravedigger were nearly always the only people in attendance.

"Most of them had outlived their families, and were totally bereft of kith and kin," Lerer told Harmon for her history of what she called "forgotten asylum cemeteries," published in the Touro Law Review in 2018.

"Some of them had been abandoned by their families, who wanted nothing to do with them because they were embarrassed by having a family member in a psychiatric facility," Lerer told Harmon.

For decades, all the graves were marked with a stone set into the ground and inscribed only with a number. In the 1980s, Lerer arranged to have headstones of his congregants, who were buried in a separate section of the cemetery, carved with their names, date of the deaths, and a Hebrew inscription; funds for the gravestones were raised from members of the community.

Helen Zimmerman, who is buried under a tall pine at the cemetery, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals in New York City throughout her life, according to her daughter, Claudia Fleming, who listened by phone Sunday from her home in Arizona as those gathered said the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning.

When Zimmerman died in 1991 at the psychiatric hospital on Wards Island, Fleming said, "it broke my heart to hear she was going to be buried in a potter’s field, not even being buried as a Jew."

Instead, Lerer arranged for Zimmerman to be buried in Central Islip, with all the proper rituals and prayers.

When Levine arrived at Touro 15 years ago and learned that there was an old cemetery beyond the tangle of vines and shrubs growing over an old chain-link fence, he was determined to restore the graveyard and "continue the legacy" begun by Lerer.

Crews cleared the brush and installed a handsome new iron fence. Members of the North Shore Jewish Center in Port Jefferson Station have helped to maintain the grave sites, sweeping away leaves, grass, and pine needles from the grave markers. And Levine organizes a yearly ceremony to say prayers for the dead.

"My mother was intelligent and creative," Fleming told Newsday.

But like many of the people with mental illness buried around her mother, "you were ostracized, you were shamed," Fleming said. " ... all these years my mother has been having the Kaddish said. My mother is not forgotten."