Caring For Monuments at Rookwood: Work in the Jewish Old Ground

Last year we took on a great project with the Jewish Cemetery Trust to complete a bunch of work in the Jewish Old Ground. The Trust is working towards a goal of fully maintaining and caring for all the monuments in their cemetery... and we are happy to be getting to opportunity to play a part in it all.

The project so far has been great, but two monuments have poised particular difficulties. Jack Fisher, the Chairman of the Jewish Cemetery Trust, set us a real challenge by asking us to include two historic marble slabs which had been badly broken, possibly by repeated vandalism, many years ago. I've done a bunch of monuments with complex breaks... but had never done a marble slab in so many pieces (in Canada, it's only with limestone bases that I've had that many pieces)... but I knew that it could be done (as the actual stone was still physically strong)... and that my co-worker Grahame and I would love to do it.

I can't say that it was a great decision financially for MiM... 'cause it certainly took alot more that the 10 hours that we were each supposed to have for it... but we did our best to minimise the actual costs to MiM and impacts by only working on the SIMMON and NATHAN stones when we had slow periods or rain-days.

We did most of the drilling in our mason's lodge... which took a good deal of rainy-day time... but even the reinstallation required patience as we did it in stages. It would have been easier to glue the pieces together on a board.. but that inevitably leads to excessive epoxy use.. uncleaned-up spills on the back... and a lack of good stone-to-stone contact. With a fragile multi-piece monument like this, it also risks real damage to the stone during the transport and reinstallation.

They are not yet unveiled, as the mortar is still curing, but they are up and all together and the gaps (which ended up being surprisingly few) are filled. The marble in all reinstalled using conservation hidden-pin repairs where stone-to-stone contact is ensured by limiting the use of epoxy to the pin holes (with a few spot applications for the very smallest of the pieces). This takes alot longer and alot more care and skill... but is vital for the long-term health of the monument: natural water movement through the stone is restored... and the permeable lime mortar used to fill the joints acts sacrificially as a site of evaporation and soluble salt concentration which concentrates weathering and pollutant damage into the replaceable mortar instead of the historic fabric.