Jewish Community Memory Garden

Memory Garden

In 2019, the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture announced a 1:1 matching grant of $100,000.00 to support the Jewish Community Memory Garden at the Eternal Home Cemetery in Colma, which is operated by Sinai Memorial Chapel Chevra Kadisha. This was supplemented by an additional 1:1 matching grant of $70,000 in February 2020. The Memory Garden provides comfort and strength to families devastated by the unexpected loss of a pregnancy or infant by memorializing those losses and by ensuring that the Jewish community is a place of solace and support. Tad Taube learned of this project at a 2019 Jewish Family and Children's Services FAMMY Gala, where the memory garden's co-creators, Debbie Findling and Abby Porth, were honored. The project held special meaning for Mr. Taube, whose mother had lost a child to miscarriage in 1938, when Tad was 7 years old. "I was reminded how the idea of a memory garden might have helped my mother if such a place had existed decades ago." The vision for the garden, spearheaded by Findling and Porth, is as a quiet, contemplative space, filled with native California trees, flowers, and plants. A circle of redwood trees surrounds a private space for meditation or ceremonies, and a circle of water will contain stones that can be rearranged by visitors, reflecting the tradition of placing a stone upon leaving a Jewish gravesite. The success of the Taube Foundation's two matching grants went a long way toward the completion of the capital funding and creating the environment of beauty and comfort envisioned by its founders.