Mount Carmel Cemetery is located in Queens, in the so-called "cemetery belt" surrounding Glendale quarter. Adopted in 1847 in New York, the act "On state rural cemeteries" ordered not to base the new burial sites in Manhattan and recommended to do it in Brooklyn and Queens. So Glendale was almost surrounded by cemeteries - they are currently twenty-nine.

Mount Carmel, founded in 1906, got its name in honor of Mount Carmel - the holy places in Israel - and became one of the most important Jewish cemeteries in America. It consists of two parts, old and new, lying between Jackie Robinson Parkway and Cooper Avenue. It is located on forty acres of more than eighty-five thousand of graves in which to rest by many well-known figures in American history.

For wrought iron fence and brick pillars at the entrance - immaculate lawns, flowers, shrubs and trees leaning over manicured monuments. In the old cemetery is the so-called street of honor - the pantheon of artists and politicians came to the US from Eastern Europe at the turn of XIX-XX centuries. Here are buried dozens of trade union leaders and writers who were the voices of the Jewish proletariat. Among them - the founder of the Jewish daily newspaper in Yiddish, "Vorwärts" Abraham Cahan, the anarchist writer Saul Yanovsky, a poet and editor Maurice Vintchevski politician Meyer London (the first socialist elected to the US Congress).

On Mount Carmel put to rest as theater actors Sarah and Jacob Adler, film actor, George Tobias, a famous comedian, "the king of one-liners" Henny Youngman, a lawyer and feminist Bella Abtsug (the first Jewish woman elected to the US Congress).

The most famous grave in the cemetery looks modest: a black monument, closely surrounded by other graves. Beneath lies the world-famous writer Sholem Aleichem, one of the founders of Yiddish literature. His novels, plays, short stories, with simplicity and humor about the life of ordinary Jews, readers loved. Many call him the Jewish Mark Twain, Mark Twain, and when he heard about this, he asked, "Please tell him that I - the American Sholem Aleichem."

Sholem Aleichem was so famous that his death in 1916 sparked an explosion of grief in New York, where he moved at the end of life. Hundreds of thousands of Jews took to the streets to accompany the hearse horse to move from Harlem to Queens, and people on the streets and in the windows wept openly, watching favorite writer. In fact, Sholem Aleichem wanted to be buried in Kyiv (he was born in Pereyaslav, near Kiev), but this desire was not fulfilled, and bow to his ashes people come here, to the black monument in the cemetery Mount Carmel.