A lawsuit has been filed against Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills charging that employees desecrated human remains while making room for new bodies, and that in some cases body parts including a skull were discarded.
Eden Hills is described as one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the US, and is also notable for being the final resting place of comedians Lenny Bruce and Groucho Marx.
The lawsuit alleges groundskeepers were secretly instructed to break buried concrete interment vaults that contained caskets that were already buried, using backhoes. It also alleges human remains would often fall out of the broken caskets, and those body parts were either scattered or thrown away…
“…We have uncovered evidence that the groundskeepers and others at Eden Memorial Park have been instructed to break off or break apart that concrete vault and, at many times, that exposes human remains…”
…The lawsuit said that under Jewish tradition, “the deceased are typically required to be interred within 24 hours, thereby leaving little time to obtain consent to move an encroaching vault in an adjacent plot and giving defendants a motive to desecrate human remains and commit other immoral acts rather than comply with the law.”
According to the lawsuit, over 500 graves may have been moved without the survivors’ permission.