As a civic cemetery, Forest Hill is a space that is open to people from a variety of different religious communities throughout Madison. This section explores how Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Hmong traditions are all represented within this space, and why members of each of the above communities might regard the cemetery as a sacred space. We will look into both the cosmological belief systems and the forms of remembrance that contribute individually and collectively to the “sacredness” of Forest Hill Cemetery.

The information you will read in this site was gathered from scholarly texts and the voices of members from the different faiths  represented at Forest Hill. We wish to thank Father Mark Miller (Catholic priest at St. Paul Church), Reverend Brad Pohlman (Lutheran pastor at Lutheran Memorial Church), Professor Charles Cohen (History, UW-Madison), Professor Ulrich Rosenhagen (Religious Studies, UW-Madison), Professor Jonathan Polack (Jewish Studies, UW-Madison),  Andrea Steinberger (Rabbi at Hillel Foundation, UW-Madison) Professor Choua Lee (Hmong language expert at UW-Madison), and Seethong Yang (M.A. student in Southeast Asian Studies UW-Madison).

Professor Cohen identifies Forest Hill as a space of negotiation, in which we accord respect to other people and their beliefs, even if we are not always completely happy about what they believe. In this sense, the cemetery is a kind of middle ground in which groups that might not always share the same space in life, congregate together as one community of the dead. In this section of the website, we are sharing our findings on what we believe are the main characteristics of how religious traditions conceive of a cemetery as a sacred space.