Temple Emanu-El Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, every good story has layers, and this one's got a few worth peelin' back. Out in Harrison County, tucked into the larger Memory Park Cemetery, there's a burial ground with a history that reaches back through the civil rights movement, through the founding of a congregation, all the way to the earliest Jewish communities in East Texas.

This is Temple Emanu-El Cemetery. In 1957, members of Temple Beth Sholom over in Kilgore, members who called Longview home, decided it was time. Time for their own synagogue, their own sacred space, their own place to remember their dead.

So they established Temple Emanu-El, and with it, they set aside this cemetery as part of the broader Memory Park grounds. Now, Harrison County already had one dedicated Jewish cemetery, the Marshall Hebrew Cemetery, which had been established way back in 1881. Temple Emanu-El Cemetery became the second.

That's a quiet kind of continuity, two generations of Jewish life putting down roots in East Texas soil. Most of the plots here are owned by temple members, and the temple itself holds the unreserved ones, kept available for members who'll need them in time. It is, in the truest sense, a community holding a place for its own.

But if you want the name that gives this cemetery a particular weight, a particular gravity, it's Rabbi Charles Mantinband. Born in 1895, died in 1974. He served Temple Emanu-El from 1963 to 1971, and he was no quiet country rabbi keeping to himself.

The marker calls him a national civil rights leader, and it means it. He is buried here, among his congregation, in this county, in this ground. The cemetery remains, as the marker says, a sacred place for Jewish activity and memory in the region.

Some places earn that description slowly, deed by deed, year by year, burial by burial. This is one of them.

What the marker says

In 1957, Longview members of Kilgore's Temple Beth Sholom established a new synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, along with a new burial ground as part of the larger Memory Park Cemetery. Temple Emanu-El Cemetery became Harrison County's second dedicated Jewish Cemetery (after Marshall Hebrew Cemetery, established in 1881). Most plots are owned by temple members, and the temple itself owns the unreserved plots, which are available to temple members. A notable burial is Rabbi Charles Mantinband (1895-1974), a national civil rights leader who served here from 1963-1971. The cemetery remains a sacred place for Jewish activity and memory in the region. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2016