Garden of Remembrance Breaks Ground on New Family Welcome Center

For over 25 years, Washington Hebrew’s Garden of Remembrance (Gan Zikaron) Memorial Park has served our members (and the entire DMV Jewish community) at their times of greatest need. GoR is a sacred and special place where loved ones are honored and the bereaved are comforted.

To fulfill its mission and even better serve the community, GoR dedicated its beautiful Memorial Center & Chapel in November 2022. Now, after 25 years in “temporary” quarters, the memorial park will build a Family Welcome Center & Office to provide an appropriate place to greet visitors, meet with families at (and in advance of) their time of need, and house GoR family advisors and staff.

We are pleased to announce that WHC members Peggy and Stan Smith have generously donated the lead gift to fund the 2,400 square foot building, which will be named in their honor. The Family Welcome Center has been designed to echo the Memorial Center & Chapel. It will not only give the memorial park a place to receive visitors, it will house and maintain GoR’s records and archives, provide a bereavement and resource library, and allow the memorial park to erect a nearby ritual hand-washing station. 

“We are enormously grateful to Peggy and Stan for their vision and support of our nonprofit cemetery,” said Hank Levine, the president of the 150-acre memorial park. “In addition to serving the families of WHC, the Family Welcome Center will enable Gan Zikaron to better serve members of its thirty-one Partner Congregations and DMV Jews who are not currently affiliated with a synagogue.”  

Thanks to the Smith gift and the pledges of others, GoR will break ground on the Family Welcome Center & Office this coming summer, even as additional funds are raised to complete the project. Dedication opportunities in the new building are available. The Project Committee, led by Neil Greenberg and including WHC Garden of Remembrance Board Members Robert Banner, Joan Greenbaum, Ken Marks, and Steve Robins, is overseeing completion of the plans and design of the interior space. 

For information about the Garden of Remembrance Memorial Park or its new Family Welcome Center & Office, please contact Glenn Easton or Hank Levine at the memorial park office, (301) 428-3000.