A suburban New York cemetery blocked a grieving widower from burying his husband in their chosen gravesite because he was gay, alleges a heartbreaking legal filing obtained by The Independent.
Mark Goldberg’s family owns five burial plots at New Montefiore Cemetery, the middle two of which are presently unoccupied, according to a summons served late last month on the Jewish graveyard in Babylon, Long Island.
After Goldberg’s husband, David, died last September at the age of 75, Mark, a retired neurologist, attempted to have David buried in one of the vacant family plots at New Montefiore, the summons states. However, it contends, administrator Joy Margolis “refused to honor the family's contractual right to have David buried in his family's burial plot, seemingly because Mark and David were married.”
The move inflicted “both monetary and continual emotional damages” on Mark Goldberg, the summons goes on. He is now seeking a monetary judgment to be determined at trial, plus attorneys’ fees, as well as a court order forcing New Montefiore to lay David Goldberg, a former addiction counselor, to rest in the family plot.
New Montefiore lays out a number of rules and regulations that visitors must follow while on the property. Among other things, liquor and “refreshments” are prohibited on cemetery grounds, tree climbing is not allowed, and the scattering of cremains on-site is strictly forbidden. And while only members of the Jewish faith are permitted to be buried there — notable occupants include former Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, onetime New York City Mayor Abe Beame, and Lou Pearlman, the record producer who discovered N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys — New Montefiore does not list any proscriptions against accepting members of the LGBTQ+ community.
In a brief phone conversation on Wednesday, Margolis responded to The Independent’s request for comment with a simple, “Not interested, sorry,” before hanging up.
Messages seeking comment from New Montefiore officials, as well as the attorneys representing them in the Goldberg action, went unanswered.
The case comes amid a flurry of anti-LGBTQ+ activity during the Trump administration’s first four weeks back in power, with the president rolling back workplace discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ employees, preventing transgender and non-binary Americans from obtaining passports that align with their preferred gender identity, eliminating LGBTQ+ content from WhiteHouse.gov and a slew of other government websites, and ordering all federal workers to erase any reference to identifying pronouns in their email signatures.
At least 27 states do not expressly include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected characteristics, and LGBTQ+ couples have previously run into the same issue Mark Goldberg alleges he is now facing.
In 2014, the Idaho State Veterans’ Cemetery refused to allow a gay Navy vet to pre-plan her eventual burial with her late wife’s ashes, citing a state law which holds that marriage between a man and a woman is “the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized.”
Two years later, a Mississippi funeral home refused to pick up and prepare an 86-year-old man’s body for cremation after discovering he had been in a same-sex relationship for the last 52 years of his life.
In January, a Houston-area funeral home refused to inter a deceased Muslim man in the cemetery of his choice, telling his family that their son’s homosexuality precluded him from receiving an Islamic burial.
On Tuesday, New Montefiore Cemetery’s legal counsel filed a demand for a complaint, which gives Mark Goldberg 20 days to submit a more detailed version of events.
In an email, his attorney, Donald David, told The Independent, “I apologize but it is our policy not to comment publicly about matters that are currently in litigation.”
