Westlawn Cemetery

For the cemetery in Canton, Ohio, see West Lawn Cemetery.

Westlawn Cemetery is a Jewish cemetery located in Norridge, a suburb of Chicago in Illinois. The cemetery covers 72 acres (29 ha) and roughly 46,000 people are buried there.

Westlawn Cemetery
Details
Established	1937 (1937)[1]
Location	Norridge, Illinois
Country	United States
Coordinates	41°57′28″N 87°49′38″W[2]
Type	Public
Style	Jewish cemetery
Size	72 acres (29 ha)
No. of interments	49,000[1]
Website	Official website
Find a Grave	Westlawn Cemetery

Notable interments

• Leonard S. Chess, record company executive^[4]
• Virginia Lee Corbin, actress
• Sandy Dvore, artist
• Mike Nussbaum, actor
• Susan Nussbaum, actress and playwright
• Richard Elrod, jurist, sheriff, and legislator
• Jack Ruby, convicted of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, who at the time was under arrest for the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy^[5]
  (His conviction was later reversed. He died awaiting a new trial, still legally presumed innocent.)^[6][7]
• Abe Saperstein, creator of the Savoy Big Five, precursor of the Harlem Globetrotters^[8]
• Harry Sawyer, Jewish-American organized crime boss based in the Twin Cities, co-conspirator and protector of the Dillinger and Barker-Karpis Gangs.^[9]
• Shel Silverstein, poet, author, satirist, and cartoonist^[10]
• Gene Siskel, film critic^[11]

Vandalism

Westlawn was the site of gravestone desecration in January 2008. At least 57 tombstones were defaced with anti-Semitic slogans. Using white and blue spray paint, the vandal drew swastikas and slurs on tombstones in a western section of the cemetery.

A 21-year-old Polish immigrant male was charged with the crime in February 2008. He has been directly linked by police to a neo-Nazi organization in the Chicago area and he was a member of the National Socialist Movement. He was convicted on two charges of felony vandalism and sentenced to 7 years in prison, the maximum sentence.^[12][13]