DMV Jewish Labor Bund Statement of Acknowledgement and Support for Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition
June 4, 2025
We, the DMV Jewish Labor Bund, demand the end of the desecration of Moses Macedonia Cemetery, material reparations, and the public apologies of the Maryland Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC), the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (MNCPPC), and 1784 Holdings for their displacement of communities and destruction of Black bodies. We stand in solidarity with Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition (BACC) as we acknowledge the complicity of the Jewish community, and call on the local Jewish community to join the fight to stop the desecration and destruction of Moses Cemetery.
Moses Macedonia African Cemetery is a historic Black burial ground at 5204 River Road in Bethesda, Maryland. It lies directly across from its current accompanying church, Macedonia Baptist Church, which was established in the 1930s. During chattel slavery, Moses cemetery held the bodies and funerary objects of the enslaved Black community. After the Civil War, the community expanded to include newly freed enslaved people from surrounding Bethesda plantations, many of whom were given their own land. Since the 1880’s, maps and documents label the area a cemetery, and later as Moses Cemetery.
However, beginning as early as the 1920’s, the county government and white developers began their displacement and terror campaign against Black residents in order to house white families in suburbia. Over the course of decades, the MNCPPC and HOC pressured Black families who had been on the land for generations to sell in order to build roads and white suburbs where a Black community already existed, complete with schools, churches, and graveyards. In 1957, the Washington Sanitary Commission (WSSC) obtained legal rights to desecrate Moses cemetery to channelize a local creek. In addition to official government agencies, the county found an unofficial ally in the local KKK chapter, which terrorized any residents who tried to hold out against rising rents, gentrification, and redlining.
Of the white developers that were recruited to do the dirty work of pricing out Black residents and building segregated suburbs on their graves, there were major Jewish actors. In the 1920’s, Morris Cafritz and Sam Eig advertised their subdivisions in Silver Spring as white only, despite the fact that Jews were also discriminated against in housing at that time. Specifically in Bethesda, Lazslo Tauber bought land in 1956 that was formerly a plantation so he could build Westbard Shopping Center and the Westbard Building. He continued purchasing land around Moses until in 1963, the last remnants of the community were forced to sell. Eyewitnesses and workers that were hired in the “development” of Moses Cemetery are quoted as having had to remove bones in burlap bags, but that most of the cemetery was left in the ground. It is not clear where the removed bodies were reburied, if at all. Despite being the victim of antisemitic discrimination as a Jew, and surviving the Holocaust himself, Tauber built his career on stealing land from Black communities and relocating buried communities to unmarked graves. Tauber’s family in Bethesda still benefits from a foundation in his name.
Today, the Black community demands justice for racist laws and seeks to hold the Montgomery County Government accountable for its role in stealing Black land. The land in question now is Parcel 175. This land had been kept by the HOC since it was stolen and sold to 1784 Capital Holdings in 2017. Despite laws that prevent sale of land with cemeteries on it, and despite an initial injunction from the Montgomery County Circuit Courts to pause the sale, development has continued. We have witnessed the graveyard be dug up and moved, despite an expert archaeologist saying there were bones present. We have witnessed officials like Marc Elrich claim that Black elders are lying when they recall memories of playing amongst the graves and reading the names as children in the 1950’s. We have witnessed smear campaigns, racial slurs, harassment, and intimidation from developers against community members and elders. All of this further confirms the county’s guilt.
The Jewish Labor Bund stands for 3 main principles: Jewishness, Solidarity, and Doikayt.
Doikayt means “hereness”, affirming that wherever a community is, people deserve mutual respect and legal rights to cultural autonomy. To us, doikayt means that the Black community of Bethesda deserved better than to have their land stolen and coerced from them, their communities destroyed, and their ancestors paved over. As members of a Jewish community that has experienced displacement and cultural genocide, and has also been complicit in these harms done to the local Black community, we stand in solidarity with our Black neighbors. We apologize for the displacement, segregation, and trauma caused by the Jewish community’s dehumanization of Black people, and pledge our support for BACC’s movement to finally end the desecration of Moses Cemetery.
