For decades, a Jewish section of Oak Woods Cemetery on Chicago's South Side sat in near ruin, its nearly 300 burial plots scarred by vandalism, neglect and time. Now a Champaign businessman named Robert Libman, the former owner of the Libman Company, is paying out of pocket to fix it, driving in regularly to oversee repairs on roughly 175 damaged graves, some dating back to the 1870s.
Libman has relatives buried in the section, about a half-dozen of them, according to Block Club Chicago. That personal tie is what pulled him into a cleanup effort that has stretched to cover a rundown brick prayer building and mausoleum, damaged tombstones glued back together, and even the removal of old fences that once divided plots by synagogue and sect. The outlet reports Libman has paid landscaping crews to maintain the grounds, plans to add a gate and a Star of David to the entrance archway, and installed a plaque in late August acknowledging his company's support.
Oak Woods Cemetery itself is a 184-acre site chartered by a special act of the Illinois General Assembly in February 1853 and laid out as a landscape-lawn park by architect Adolph Strauch, according to The Cultural Landscape Foundation. The oldest Jewish section within it was established in 1874 by the Ohave Shalom Marijampol congregation to serve Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who had settled near Maxwell Street, per the Times of Israel.
A Family History Rooted in Chicago and Scarred by Violence
The Libman Company traces back to 1896, when Lithuanian immigrant William Libman started it as a pushcart broom business in Chicago before it grew into a manufacturer that eventually moved its main facility to Arcola, Illinois, in 1957, according to Block Club's reporting. The family left Chicago for downstate Illinois in the 1930s, fleeing mobsters who tried to extort the company, the outlet reports. Today the company, now led by CEO Andrew Libman after Robert passed ownership to his children, employs hundreds of people making cleaning products sold in stores nationwide.
The Jewish exodus from Chicago's South and West Sides that began around the 1900s eventually left the cemetery section's owner congregations scattered or dissolved. According to Block Club, the section experienced an antisemitic attack in 1947 that desecrated nearly 200 plots, vandalism so severe it led the city to condemn the cemetery. The cemetery's Jewish sections are owned by four area synagogues, not by Oak Woods' central management firm, Dignity Memorial, which the outlet reports does not own or maintain that land and did not respond to requests for comment.
Congregations Struggled to Keep Up Maintenance
Ben Zion Lazovsky, associate rabbi for Beth Hamedrosh Kesser Maariv, which owns a section of the cemetery tied to suburban Skokie, told Block Club that his congregation received many angry calls about the burial ground's condition over the years. He said leaders believed they had reached an agreement in the early 2000s to clean up the area, but it was never finalized, adding that a cemetery association, not the synagogue, held responsibility for the land and that Beth Hamedrosh Kesser Maariv had little control over it. A separate section owned by Anshe Sholom B'nai Israel, tied to Lakeview, improved only after a different donation from someone with a relative buried there, per the same report.
Marcey Siegel, a genealogist with the Jewish Genealogical Society of Illinois, commended Libman for financing the work, telling Block Club that he simply acted where others hadn't. The society maintains an active database project mapping and indexing burial records at Oak Woods to help families locate ancestral graves in neglected sections, a volunteer effort described by the Hyde Park Historical Society. Siegel said she hopes attention around the Jewish High Holidays will bring more visitors to the cemetery.
Restoring, But Not Erasing, the Past
Libman told Block Club the cemetery had become forgotten land, and that he wants to restore basic dignity to the people buried there. He's spent a significant amount of money on the effort and remains unsure what to do with the rundown prayer building and mausoleum, both of which still need repair. He has visited the grounds with his own two children, and rocks pulled from the cemetery's paths are now being repurposed as visitation stones, a Jewish tradition of leaving stones at graves.
Mark Mandle, a founding board member of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, described the cemetery's long decline as an unspoken shame, according to the same report. Lazovsky, for his part, said Libman should be blessed for the work. Block Club notes that many tombstones and sites have undergone significant maintenance in recent years, though some gravesites still need repairs, with the most recent burials in the section dating to the 1970s and 1980s.
A Broader Pattern of Neglected Burial Grounds
The challenge facing Oak Woods' Jewish sections reflects a wider problem across Illinois, where burial grounds tied to distant or defunct religious organizations often fall outside any active maintenance structure. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation launched the Cemetery Relief Fund Grants program in August 2025, offering grants of up to $20,000 to help local governments and nonprofits clean up neglected cemeteries statewide. That program followed the 2010 Cemetery Oversight Act, passed after a grave-reselling scandal at Cook County's Burr Oak Cemetery, which created a statewide burial database and stricter licensing rules for cemetery managers, per the Township Officials of Illinois. Even so, religious-owned plots like those at Oak Woods often operate under partial exemptions, leaving private philanthropy and volunteer genealogical work as the main lifelines for preserving them.
Oak Woods has its own history of confronting exclusion. In May 1963, an estimated 2,000 civil rights demonstrators marched to the cemetery's gates after management refused to cremate the body of a Black Chicagoan named Alvesta Wilson, a protest that helped force the desegregation of the city's private non-sectarian cemeteries, according to the National Park Service. A managed section of the grounds also holds the Eternal Light Monument, erected in 1956 and dedicated to more than six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust alongside American Jewish military veterans, according to the Hyde Park Historical Society. University of Chicago researchers produced a 2024 documentary examining Oak Woods' four Jewish sections as artifacts of vanished Midwestern Jewish communities, a project highlighted by the Martin Marty Center.
