Sympathy flowers in Cherry Hill

The chapel geography here is compact and it is denominationally specific. Platt Memorial Chapels on Berlin Road handles a large share of the township's Jewish funerals. Kain-Murphy Funeral Services in Haddonfield serves the Kings Highway side of the county, and Bradley Funeral Home on Route 73 in Marlton serves the Evesham and Burlington County edge. Beyond those, the corridors themselves are the landmark: funeral homes cluster along Kings Highway in Haddonfield and Haddon Heights, Haddon Avenue through Collingswood and Haddon Township, Route 130 and Westfield Avenue in Pennsauken and Merchantville, the Black Horse Pike through Runnemede and Bellmawr, and North Broad Street in Woodbury. The burial side is easier to name and very close in. Colestown Cemetery sits inside Cherry Hill where Kings Highway meets Church Road and is one of the oldest burying grounds in the county. Locustwood Memorial Park is on Route 70 in the township. Arlington Cemetery is across the line in Pennsauken, alongside a long-established cluster of Jewish cemeteries on that side of the Cooper River. And Harleigh Cemetery in Camden — where Walt Whitman built the granite tomb he designed himself and where he is buried — takes graveside work from the whole region. Ten to fifteen minutes separates most Cherry Hill addresses from any of them.

Because Cherry Hill has a large, long-established Jewish community — the Katz JCC and the Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey share a campus on Springdale Road, and the township's synagogues are a short drive from one another — the most useful thing this page can tell an out-of-town sender is that flowers are not the universal answer here. Jewish funeral practice does not traditionally include flowers at the chapel or the graveside; the customary gestures are a donation in the deceased's memory, a condolence call, and food or a living plant sent to the shiva house rather than cut arrangements sent to the service. A peace lily or a green plant in a simple ceramic vessel delivered to the family's home during shiva is appropriate and is welcomed; a standing spray sent to the chapel is not. If you do not know the family's practice, the funeral home will tell you plainly, and it is a completely normal question to ask. For the township's Catholic families — the parishes along Chapel Avenue and Kings Highway, with funeral Masses followed by a short procession to Colestown, Locustwood or one of the Camden County Catholic grounds — traditional standing and easel work is expected, and the same is true across most of the Protestant and non-denominational congregations in Collingswood, Haddon Heights, Runnemede and Woodbury.