November 2014 - Freedom of Information (FOI) Documents

For seven (7) years, I have attempted to obtain documents from the New York Attorney General (NY AG) pertaining to their eleven (11) year investigation of the situation at Bayside Cemetery and Congregation Shaare Zedek's 130+ year management of the cemetery. After repeated filings of FOI requests and denials by the NY AG, I have finally been able to obtain these documents.

Apparently the NY AG quietly, and without any formal declaration or notice, closed their eleven (11) year investigation of the Bayside Cemetery matter without any publicly announced formal sanctions, actions, forensic accountings, actuarial analyses, orders of restitution, etc. As a result, Bayside Cemetery remains nearly destitute and in a deperate state of disrepair, mismanagement and without any formal permanent fix to the annual and perpetual care issues at the cemetery.

While one may say the reason the NY AG didn't take action was because they found no cause, it would be a useful exercise to review these FOI documents to derive your own thoughts on the issues and the quality of the NY AG's investigation.

What follows in the 15 hyperlinks are 7006 pages of documents released by the NY AG pertaining to Bayside Cemetery and Congregation Shaare Zedek and other entities involved in the Bayside Cemetery matter. Many of the documents are redundant due to the structure and requirements for disclosing parties in the FOI disclosure process.  But there are many significant findings in these documents which I found to be startling, revealing, potentially improper or just plain amazing - definitely not in keeping with the responsible stewardship of Bayside Cemetery or respect for the over 34,000 deceased people residing in those sacred grounds.

You can click on each link to download the document sections.  I divided these up into smaller pieces because there is a total of over 250 megabytes of documents.

A Request For You From Me Please: as you review these documents, please email me your thoughts, findings, ah-hah's, things that jump out at you, etc. I've read through these documents as best I could but it's hard for one person to see all that is there because there is so much. I'm very interested in hearing from you via a "crowdsource method" - so please be in touch.  My email address is JohnLucker@comcast.net.

I will also soon be posting an index of document page numbers and my thoughts/observations for each from my review of these documents for you to consider and see what I found.  Again, please email me your thoughts.

Each downloadable PDF is read password protected with the same password. To get access to the document contents, please email me for the password at JohnLucker@comcast.net.

Note: In some web browsers (like Mac OSX Safari), If you just click on these links, nothing will open. You need to Right Mouse Click on each link to download the document to your computer and then open the document from your computer. You will then be prompted for the Read Password. In other browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer), a click on the link works and prompts for the password and then you can download the file to your computer separately.

FOI Pages 1-250
FOI Pages 251-500
FOI Pages 501-750
FOI Pages 751-1000
FOI Pages 1001-1250
FOI Pages 1251-1500
FOI Pages 1501-1750
FOI Pages 1751-2000
FOI Pages 2001-2250
FOI Pages 2251-2500
FOI Pages 2501-2750
FOI Pages 2751-3000
FOI Pages 3001-3250
FOI Pages 3251-3500
FOI Pages 3501-3750
FOI Pages 3751-4000
FOI Pages 4001-4250
FOI Pages 4251-4500
FOI Pages 4501-4750
FOI Pages 4751-5000
FOI Pages 5001-5250
FOI Pages 5251-5500
FOI Pages 5501-5750
FOI Pages 5751-6000
FOI Pages 6001-6250
FOI Pages 6251-6500
FOI Pages 6501-6750
FOI Pages 6751-7000
FOI Pages 7001-7006