| Cemetery Description: |
The Piateroter Young Men's Benevolent Association plot at Beth David Cemetery is located in the northwest corner of block B11. The entrance to the plot is on the south side of Emanuel Ave., just to the east of Cleveland Ave. (These are streets inside Beth David Cemetery, not city streets.) I do not know what, if any, numbering system the cemetery office uses, so I have made up my own numbering system. The rows are counted starting from the back, although two graves in the very back on the left, facing a different direction than the other graves, are not counted as one of the rows. The plots are numbered from left to right, in each row. All rows have 11 plots to the right of the path. Rows 2 and 3 have 8 plots to the left of the path, while rows 4 through 7 have 9 plots to the left of the path. The other rows are not filled in enough to the left of the path to tell how many plots they have. For purposes of numbering the plots, I have assumed that row 1 has 8 plots to the left of the path, and rows 8, 9, and 12 have 9 plots to the left of the path. There are no graves in row 10, and rows 11 and 13 only have graves all the way on the left side. The Piateroter (sometimes spelled Pioteroter) Young Men's Benevolent Association was founded in January 1909 in New York by landsmen from Piaterota, the unofficial Yiddish name for a small town located in Ukraine near the northern border of Kherson guberniya, at 48°45'N, 30°59'E. Its official name, according to U.S.S.R. Official Standard Names, Gazeteer No. 42, published by the U. S. Board on Geographic Names (1970), was Kalnibolot, and this reference (which is the source used by the Jewishgen Shtetl Finder) also lists it as having unofficial names Kalniboloto and Pyataya Rota. The latter name, which means "Fifth Army" in Russian, is the source of the unofficial Yiddish name Piaterota, not listed there. Unfortunately, Pyataya Rota does not have the same soundex code as Piaterota, which makes it difficult to locate Piaterota in the Shtetl Finder. Piaterota should not be confused with another shtetl, Katerinopol (or Yekaterinopol), located about 10 miles north of Piaterota in Kiev guberniya, which also has the unofficial name Kalniboloto, and was generally called Kalnibolot by the Jews living there; Where Once We Walked makes this error (at least the first edition did). I am quite certain that the above identification of Piaterota is correct, because Carl Ulanoff, who came from there, told me the names of other nearby towns and their distances, and his cousin Jean Wollen, who also came from there, told me the names of some other nearby towns, and all of this information is consistent with the above identification. When the original Piateroter Y.M.B.A. plot at Mt. Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, NY, began to get full, this plot was purchased. The Piateroter Young Men's Benevolent Association was disbanded about 1979. It is likely that some of the graves in this plot, particularly after 1979, are occupied by people who had no connection to Piaterota, but bought gravesites here from members of the Piateroter Y.M.B.A. or their families. I have indicated under "Comments" when people are listed on one of several membership lists I have seen for the Piatetoter Y.M.B.A., including a list carved on the columns at the entrance to this plot. Generally, only men are listed as members, except for some widows. People buried here who have the same last name as a member are likely to be relatives of members, even if they are not listed as members themselves. Some of the people buried here who are not listed as members may be relatives of members with different last names, or they may have been members only in years for which I do not have a membership list, but I have no way to know that. I gathered this data in June 2005, with help from my cousin Kenneth Gerver, and my son Avi Gerver, a talented professional photographer (www.avigerver.com) who took the photographs. (The original photographs were much higher resolution, but I had to reduce the resolution to meet the requirements of JOWBR.) Although in many cases I knew the names of people's spouses and parents, I only listed those names in the appropriate columns when I had obtained this information from death certificates, in accordance with the JOWBR rules. In the case of spouses, I assumed that having a double headstone was sufficient evidence that two people were married. In all other cases, I listed the information I had under the "Comments/Notes" column, and noted that it was from family knowledge. In transliterating Hebrew names, I have tried to indicate the Hebrew/Yiddish spelling. For example, some women's Yiddish names may end in "a", "e" or "ah" depending on whether they are spelled with an aleph, an ayin, or a he at the end. Similarly, in a transliteration like "Beril," the "i" indicates a yod in the Yiddish spelling. However, for standard Hebrew names like Moshe, I have used the standard English transliteration, and not, for example, "Mosheh" to indicate the "he" at the end. Michael Gerver (great-grandson of Israel and Scheindel WORONOFF)
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