by Bill Aldacushion with gravestone photos and maps contributed by Andrei & Tanya Conovaloff

Home of  Peace Memorial Park is located at 4334 Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles near the intersection of the Santa Ana (I-5) and Long Beach (710) Freeways. Click on the map (right) to enlarge it for more detail. It's next to other cemeteries. You can easily see it going south on the Long Beach Freeway. Tourists often visit Home of Peace Memorial Park to find the graves of famous Jewish actors, movie moguls, and politicians, including two of  The Three Stooges, and three of the Warner Brothers. The cemetery is closed on Saturday as well as other major Jewish holidays.

The Subbotnik congregation in Los Angeles preferred the Home of Peace Memorial Park because services could be conducted in a similar manner to what they observed in their native Russia following the traditions of the Old Testament and Jewish religious practices they had adopted. However, since they were Russians and not Jews, acceptance by the controlling Jewish congregation was not automatic. The Subbotnik elders had to petition and demonstrate that their religious and burial practices were compatible with Jewish services. Eventually they were allowed to conduct their funerals there. Click here for more background on Subbotnik Funerals in Los Angeles contained in Chapter 6 of the author's Subbotnik Research Report published on the Subbotniki.net web site.

A streetcar line running down Whittier Boulevard offered a convenient way to transport bodies of the deceased and the funeral party from the Russian Colony in The Flats section of Los Angeles out to Home of Peace. From 1909 to 1940, a special funeral streetcar coach was available to charter for the occasion. Before 1909, horse drawn carriages were used. Some historical notes about Home and Peace Memorial Park can be found at the bottom of this page.

The grave sites of 114 known Subbotniki have been located in five sections of the cemetery and listed in the summary table below on this page. The information was originally compiled from a two volume report, Home of Peace Memorial Park - First Hundred Years, extracted from cemetery administrative records (through 1969) by Margaret Jayred Schulz for the Southern California Genealogy Society in February 1998. That data included name, grave location, age, gender, place & dates of birth & death, burial date, occupation, mortuary and comments. In November and December 2011, Andrei and Tanya Conovaloff conducted and exhaustive survey of Home of Peace grounds and discovered several more recent burials. They took photographs of the grave stones and markers of known Subbotniki family names and recorded their row and plot numbers. Genealogy records and other family history data were integrated with this baseline information by the author of this article to update the original version of the table that was built using the 1998 report.

The records in the table can be grouped into seventeen Subbotnik family names with variation in the basic spelling. Some variations are just differences in transliterating the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. Other variations represented attempts by the Subbotniki to simplify or Americanize their names.  The list also includes the married names of Subbotniki who wed non-Subbotnik husbands. By clicking on the names in the table you can view the related grave stone. 

Comments, corrections, additions and suggestions are welcome. Send to Bill Aldacushion

Home of Peace Section Layout
Six Subbotniki Sections are highlighted

Children's Benevolent Section

Northeast Section

East Section

Sabotnick Section

In 1855 The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Los Angeles purchased land near the present Chavez Ravine* to be used for a cemetery. No one is sure exactly where the old burial ground was located. However, according to the records, the first burial occurred in 1858. In 1891 the Home of Peace Society was founded by Jewish women of Los Angeles for the purpose of caring for and maintaining the property. In 1902 the present location on Whittier Blvd. was purchased by B’nai B’rith Congregation. The 360 graves were removed from the old cite to the new grounds between that time and 1910. The site was originally called Home of Peace Cemetery, and later the name was changed to Home of Peace Memorial Park.

Home of Peace Memorial Park: Home of Peace (new) Cemetery (aka Hills of Eternity Cemetery). Opened in current location in 1902, this original Jewish cemetery was founded in 1855. Approximately 50,000 burials by 2000, the site is owned and operated by Wilshire Boulevard Temple (Congregation B'nai B'rith). Home of Peace is the successor to the first Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles originally founded as the cemetery of the Hebrew Benevolent Society in 1855 in Chavez Ravine*, it was moved to its current location in 1902. The remains of the 360 Jews buried in the old cemetery were moved between 1902 and 1910. The principals who started the Hebrew Benevolent Society Burial Ground were the same people who started Congregation B'nai B'rith that took over the cemetery in 1902. About 1870, Jewish women maintained the Hebrew Benevolent Society Burial Ground and called themselves the Home of Peace Society.