That incident and others led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to declare that freedom and decency could be destroyed everywhere if Americans ignored the "virus of bigotry" or permitted it "to spread one inch.

"[3] Nevertheless, continued vandalism,[4][5][6][7] as well as apathy and neglect[2] remained problems at Baron Hirsch for decades, resulting in numerous overturned grave markers.

The 121st precinct house of the New York Police Department, which is adjacent to the cemetery and overlooks it, opened in 2013[8] and may have helped curb vandalism as well.

The cemetery is composed of about 500 plots or sections belonging to synagogues, Jewish associations, family circles, and most commonly, landsmanshaftn.

Some of the landsmanshaftn plots have monuments dedicated to Holocaust victims of the Nazis in their ancestral town, including plots for immigrants from Wodzislaw, Poland; Gvardeyskoye and Nadvirna, Ukraine; and Hlusk, Belarus.