Columbia resident David Zinner founded a group five years ago that trains Maryland prisoners to clean up cemeteries. Zinner, who also formed an organization to spread the word about “green burials,” helped pass recent legislation to catalog and protect the state’s historic cemeteries. He is also an avid biker. Photo by Edward Warner

• Share

PRINT

It’s often said that Amercians fear death: We rarely talk about it, and sometimes, we even abandon family burial sites, leaving them untended and unprotected.

David Zinner, 75, of Columbia, is fighting that trend — and succeeding.

He wants people to know that, as he put it in a recent interview with the Beacon, “talking about death won’t kill ya.”

This fall, Maryland’s abandoned cemeteries will get a boost. A new piece of legislation that aims to revitalize the state’s abandoned cemeteries goes into effect in October. Although volunteers will initially carry out the work, Zinner hopes the state will provide funding for them later.

In December, a second piece of legislation Zinner and others helped pass will initiate what may be the state’s first census of its cemeteries.

That census, Zinner hopes, will help prevent gravesites from being lost. Sometimes they’re lost due to poor recordkeeping; other times, developers will try to remove gravestones and build on the land.

A 30-year advocacy

Zinner began fighting for cemeteries in the early 1990s, when he and others stepped up to save an Ellicott City cemetery from becoming the site of new houses.

It wasn’t easy. The developer breaking ground on the site of St. Mary’s Cemetery had struck human bones before the county listened to opponents like Zinner and offered the developer a different parcel of land.

“I got into death accidentally,” he joked, “and it was at the time a really small pond. You never saw articles in the New York Times or Washington Post about death.”

Zinner started his career decades ago as a community organizer in Chicago, where he helped organize food cooperatives. He’s been active in organizing ever since.

More recently, in 2020 Zinner co-founded a group called the Preservation and Rehabilitation Initiative for Neglected Cemetery Entities, or PRINCE. It teaches the Maryland prison population how to do cleanups, cut trees and remove invasive species in cemeteries.

Zinner said the group was “designed with three ideas in mind: To get prisoners into the fresh air, to do something that was meaningful and to give them some skills so they could find jobs” when released.

So far, PRINCE has helped rehabilitate about 10 cemeteries. In 2013, it cleaned up an 1860s era cemetery near Columbia’s Locust United Methodist Church where several freed slaves are interred. The head of the church’s cemetery committee, Roberta Kelly, said the six prisoners who worked there for three days “were fabulous help. [It] looks like a whole new place.”

At a 100-year-old cemetery of former mill workers in Oella, PRINCE’s prisoners lugged the remains of felled trees up the steep hillside and removed invasive plants.

For Zinner it’s not just about where the dead lie but how they are laid to rest. Zinner, who was executive director of Washington, D.C.’s Congregation Tifereth Israel for 10 years until his 2013 retirement, explained that when someone dies in the Jewish community, survivors delegate friends to become a “holy society” that washes and dresses the body. These practices were once seen as Orthodox, but now more Jewish families are expressing interest in them, he said.

That, too, is in part due to Zinner’s efforts. Three years ago he founded the Jewish Association for Death Education (JADE), which has a $250,000 annual budget and five field representatives who conduct trainings nationally about how a practice involving acts like washing a body by hand can be valuable to the bereaved.

“The people who do this work are changed by this work — it changes how you look at life,” he said. “Mortality is real.”

JADE’s website has received millions of visitors, and those it trains later train others. Zinner can’t say how many trainers JADE has now, but cites how, a few years after he did a training in Boston, “They had 175 volunteers in their group” and they are now spreading the message like “Johnny Appleseeds.”

JADE has something of an uphill battle, though, since some estimates say as many as half of American Jews choose cremation, whereas traditional practice is to use burial within days.

Traditional burials are better for the environment, as they shun chemical embalming. So-called “green burials” are becoming more common across all faiths, and a cemetery focused on them has opened in Baltimore County. In fact, Zinner recently helped inaugurate the Jewish section there.

The past inspires the present

How’d a nice Jewish boy get so obsessed with death? Don’t blame Woody Allen. The reason may, in fact, lie with the summer job he took at age 13, helping maintain his synagogue’s cemetery in St. Louis. His parents now lie there.

Dig deeper, and the reason might be a fateful trip he took with his mother in 2000 to Germany, the land his mother and her parents escaped from just prior to World War II.

Seeking the graves of relatives, they visited a town where an old man took them to a hilltop cemetery, a place he said that he and others protect from vandals each year on Kristallnacht, the night made infamous by attacks on Jews in 1930s Germany.

At another cemetery there, they encountered a locked gate. Zinner, then 50 years old, jumped the fence to open the gate, so they could find their relative’s resting place.

Besides his roles with PRINCE and JADE, Zinner is also a member of yet another group, the Maryland Cemetery Advocates, which helped get the two cemetery bills passed this year.

Zinner also organizes a beloved local event. For the past two years, he and his wife, Rosyln, inspired by their love of Caribbean snorkeling, have held Columbia’s annual, two-day Coral Reef Encounter at the Jeffers Hill Swimming Pool. There, participants float through an underwater route resembling a coral reef filled with 300 handmade fish.

Sometimes, attendees approach the Zinners, wondering, “Are you paid?”

Yes, he replies, “We’re paid in smiles.”

Beyond snorkeling, Zinner’s favorite outdoor activity is bicycling, and of course he has combined that passion with his Jewish spirituality and respect for cemeteries.

This year, one of the rides he leads for the Howard County Cycle2Health program will tour several sukkot, which Jewish families build on their lawns in early autumn. Another ride will visit several county cemeteries, including one that’s well off the trail encircling Baltimore Washington International Airport.

Whether by leading bike rides or helping overcome unease over death, Zinner still follows the philosophy he started with: “Improve the world by helping people in the world.”

For more information about JADE, visit jadeinfo.org.

Do you know a 50+ person with an interesting hobby, second career or volunteer role? Let us know at info@thebeaconnewspapers.com.