Congregation Sherith Israel, one of San Francisco's oldest Jewish congregations, established Hills of Eternity Memorial Park as its burial ground during the period when San Francisco was actively relocating its cemeteries outside city limits. The 1889 founding placed it among the earliest cemeteries in Colma, the small town south of the city that would eventually become known as the City of the Silent. The congregation's decision to establish its own dedicated burial ground reflected both religious necessity -- Jewish law requires specific burial practices -- and the community's confidence that San Francisco's Jewish population would endure.

Colma's identity as a necropolis is well documented: the dead outnumber the living by roughly a thousand to one. Hills of Eternity takes its place alongside Cypress Lawn, Holy Cross, Home of Peace, and the other cemeteries that line El Camino Real, each serving a different community but all sharing the same soil. The Jewish cemeteries form a cluster, their boundaries touching, creating a landscape where different congregations rest side by side in death as they worshipped side by side in life. The grounds of Hills of Eternity are maintained with the care that perpetual-care endowments provide: manicured lawns, mature trees, and headstones that mark the passage of San Francisco's Jewish generations.

Walking through Hills of Eternity is reading the history of Jewish San Francisco in stone. The names span the full arc of the community's story: Gold Rush merchants, Gilded Age philanthropists, 20th-century professionals, Holocaust survivors who rebuilt their lives on the West Coast, and the ordinary families whose names appear only here. The cemetery serves not just as a burial ground but as a genealogical record, a physical archive of a community that has been part of San Francisco since the city's founding. In a city that constantly reinvents itself, Hills of Eternity offers something rare: permanence.