N.J. cemetery pres. paid more than any other Jewish non-profit official in U.S.

Cedar Park general manager defends president’s compensation, citing the cemetery’s ‘state of the art facilities.’

By Josh Nathan-Kazis

 

 

Ask those in the know who the highest paid executives at Jewish not-for-profits are, and you are likely to hear about salaries at groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center or any number of big-city Jewish federations. But as it turns out, a Jewish executive at a not-for-profit cemetery in northern New Jersey is paid more than nearly any other Jewish communal official in the country.

Cedar Park & Beth El Cemetery.

Cedar Park & Beth El Cemetery. - Photo by Shulamit Seidler-Feller / Forward

 

Cedar Park & Beth El Cemetery’s president, Herbert B. Klapper, took home a base salary of $729,000 in 2009, according to tax documents. That’s more than any Jewish federation executive in the United States, not to mention the heads of all but one major Jewish defense agency.

Only one other not-for-profit cemetery in the country with comparable revenues paid its top executive a higher salary in 2009, according to a national not-for-profit compensation database. That cemetery, which is not Jewish, had assets three and a half times larger than those of Cedar Park.

Cedar Park general manager Lawrence Rose defended Klapper’s compensation, citing the cemetery’s “state of the art facilities.”

In 2000, Klapper and two other individuals now affiliated with Cedar Park were forced to give up their leadership roles at three New York cemetery corporations upon signing an assurance of discontinuance with the New York State attorney general, who accused them of receiving unfair compensation.

 

Read more at the Forward.
See original HAARETZ publication at: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/n-j-cemetery-pres-paid-more-than-any-other-jewish-non-profit-official-in-u-s-1.436130