Congregation Emanu-El was founded in 1850, the year California became a state, making it one of the oldest Jewish congregations west of the Mississippi. The congregation's members included many of San Francisco's most influential business leaders, philanthropists, and civic figures. Home of Peace Cemetery served as the final resting place for these families, and the Emanu-El Mausoleum within its grounds provided an architecturally distinguished space for above-ground burial. The cemetery's founding in 1889 placed it in Colma before San Francisco's cemetery removal campaign accelerated, giving the congregation a permanent burial ground outside the city limits.

Home of Peace is one of four Jewish cemeteries clustered in Colma, reflecting the diversity of San Francisco's Jewish community. Each cemetery serves a different congregation or organization, and together they represent the full spectrum of Jewish denominational life in the Bay Area: Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and unaffiliated. The proximity of the cemeteries to each other creates a Jewish quarter of the dead -- a landscape where different traditions share the same soil while maintaining their distinct identities.

The name Navai Shalome -- Home of Peace -- carries a theological weight that the cemetery's quiet grounds sustain. In a town defined by its relationship to mortality, Home of Peace offers the specific comfort of a community that has tended its dead with continuity for more than 130 years. The grounds are maintained, the mausoleum is preserved, and the congregation that founded the cemetery still exists and still worships in San Francisco. That continuity -- from Gold Rush to present, from founding to the 21st century -- is the peace the name promises.