The east side of the cemetery lacks that kind of history but makes up for that lack with devout diversity. Virgin Mary statues gaze over gravesites; red-robed Jesuses extend forgiving hands toward heaven, their Sacred Hearts almost glowing from their chests. There are also Sabbath candles, Stars of David, and other stuff exhibited on the east side that one might find in any Miami botánica or Judaica shop. But this ain't Miami. It's Boca. One might think that a city often blasted for its homogeneity would welcome a chance to embrace ethno-religious icons in its public cemetery and that its rules should apply to all plots, regardless of size or location. Maybe a moneyed city like Boca Raton shouldn't meddle with one's constitutional right to freedom of expression or the way families honor their dead. East-side plot owners thought some of this and more.
Last year the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit against the City of Boca Raton on behalf of seven families seeking to protect their loved ones' gravesites from the city's agenda: to tear down all of the east side's upright markers, including simple crosses, Jewish stars, ceramic angels, even children's shrines adorned with toy trucks and baby blocks.
The lawsuit is the first brought under Florida's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which protects a person's religious practices from needless government intrusion. But the city claims its cemetery's rules aren't aimed at religion, just at its visage. In Boca's cemetery, religious markers are OK; it's when they stand up to be counted that the city grumbles. Even odder is the city's sudden urge to enforce rules disregarded since the early '80s. Plaintiffs also say no one ever gave them a copy of cemetery regulations. The owners never questioned whether their markers were allowed, because when they first bought their plots, they saw all sorts of vertical shrines and monuments dotting the east and west sides of the cemetery.
"On the west side they still have these huge granite crosses, and I think they are beautiful," testified Souhail Karram, a plaintiff named in the suit, who buried his wife, Pamela, in a plot on the east side. Impressed with the cemetery's gardenlike atmosphere, Karram purchased 15 additional plots and set about planting lavender heather and placing a modest wooden border around the grave of his wife of 39 years. Because he and his family are Christians, Karram erected a white wooden cross on the grave as well.
"Standing up there it tells you a lot. It gives you hope that one day… we will meet our loved ones again. It is comforting," said Karram, who added that workers and the cemetery manager at the time admired the way he tended his wife's plot. "When I told him what I was going to do,… he said, 'Do what you want.' They would come and look and say, 'Oh, it is beautiful.' Nobody ever said to me, 'You cannot do this or you can't do that.'"
Boca Raton lawyer Charlotte Danciu wasn't aware that her own grandparents' gravesites could be desecrated until plaintiffs first approached her seeking legal counsel. Besides volunteering as one of the ACLU's attorneys for the case, Charlotte Danciu is also the daughter of Eleanor Danciu, one of the plaintiffs. The Danciu plots were initially bought in 1984 when Charlotte's grandmother died; a Virgin Mary was placed upon her east-side grave as was a bronze double headstone. After Charlotte's grandfather's death in 1994, the family added a statue of Saint Francis of Assisi to the gravesites.
"My mother probably goes there every day. We go on Sundays and holidays, gather around the grave, pray to the Virgin Mary," says Charlotte Danciu. "Now the City of Boca says we can't."
What the city says can conflict with what it does. Besides the city's nonenforcement of cemetery rules for more than 15 years, there's a strange discordance behind the city's reasons for leveling the east side.
Bruce Rogow, legal counsel for Boca Raton, conveys that one of the city's objections to vertical markers is that they hinder burials because they obstruct the machines used for digging. "It's very narrow between plots. Let's assume that people put up all kinds of these shrines and it comes time to bury someone. What are you going to do? Are you going to break [surrounding] headstones to bury people?" asks Rogow. He explains that Section A of the cemetery is exempt from the rules because it contains larger gravesites with easier access. Rogow says that these west-side graves also escape regulation because they were moved from other burial places and were already marked. "They, of course, kept the same kind of headstones; those gravesites were grandfathered in," he says.
Not all of them. Near the west side's front gate stands a refrigerator-size vertical monument of two gleaming white cupids frolicking above a black marble base. Burial date: 1997. This gravesite also lacks the extra surrounding space that Rogow mentioned as common to Section A. Just a few steps away, five turn-of-the-century tombstones crowd around the cupids. According to the city's concerns, the older markers could have been damaged during their baroque neighbor's installation. They weren't.
The city also cites safety as key in its quest to prohibit and dismantle all that stands upright. Perhaps rocks and other loose items might be sucked into lawn mowers and rain like bullets into the air, harming cemetery workers and landscapers. To date there is no report of any gardening injury incurred in either the east or the west side of the cemetery, but there have been instances where east-side graves were paid little heed.
Last May, Charlotte Danciu says she witnessed workers careening around the east side of the cemetery in motorized carts for no apparent reason. "It was almost dusk, maybe five o'clock. They rode up right over the graves, and then they went to the center and rode right down the middle of the grass, right over the graves as opposed to using the service road that goes around the land. If some people didn't have borders, they would have ridden right over their graves," says Danciu.
Historically the interred have not rested easily in Boca. Many buried at the city's municipal cemetery can rank their current ground as the third stop in a long jaunt that began in the early 1900s in one acre of land adjacent to the Boca Raton Hotel.
After the land was purchased by utilities tycoon Clarence Geist, those buried were exhumed and carted over to a patch of land near where Florida Atlantic University now stands. During WWII, the Army Air Corps decided their need for solid ground was greater than the cemetery's, and once again the dead were disinterred and trundled to where they now reside, not in peace but again in a battle for their sanctity.
In March a federal judge ruled in favor of the city and allowed it to remove all religious symbols from the gravesites of loved ones. The court contended that the vertical memorials on the east side weren't intrinsic or even required by the faiths of plot owners, although many testified to the contrary. "My religion and my faith are like the core of an apple that's inside of me," said Eleanor Danciu. "Everything I do is based on that." ACLU attorneys are appealing and indicate they're willing to take the case as far as it will go. Until then the east side's graves will remain intact.
Ironically the original trustees of the Boca Raton Cemetery would have sympathized with Danciu's and the other plaintiffs' plight. In a now yellow and brittle letter addressed to the people of Boca Raton, trustees offer the city's first cemetery grounds as a sacred place best left undisturbed: We intend to make a beautiful little park of the place and to care for it as long as we have friends there. The land has been deeded to us and can never be used for any other purpose…. Relatives can erect headstones and plant flowers as they choose.
Contact Emma Trelles at her e-mail address:
