|
This
past week, New Yorkers commemorated the 95th anniversary of the Triangle
Shirtwaist sweatshop fire that took the lives of 146 people, many of them
Jews, on March 25, 1911. It’s an event that reminds us that one
Jewish organization — the Hebrew Free Burial Association — was
doing in 1911 what it’s still doing today: Making sure that every
poor Jew, regardless of life’s bad breaks, regardless of affiliation,
gets a dignified Jewish burial, as was the case for 23 victims of the fire.
The organized Jewish community aspires to help all of us, particularly the
least fortunate of us, from cradle to grave, and here’s where that
final promise is kept. Ever since 1888, the association has kept 60,000
Jews from being disposed of as cadavers or in a Potter’s Field. The
association’s Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island, the largest
free cemetery in the diaspora, is the resting place of babies, elderly, and
those who died in their prime; loved or abandoned; souls rescued from
forgotten apartments, homeless shelters, city morgues or a family’s
desperation.
Up to 500 people a year are buried at Mount Richmond, about half of them
immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
The association now hopes to do what it previously couldn’t afford
— placing a monument on every one of hundreds of graves that
don’t have one, a promise fulfilled even years after death. One
Triangle victim, Leibel Rosen, only got his stone in 1998.
Caring for the dead is a mitzvah that famously can’t get a thank you.
But the Hebrew Free Burial Association is not only helping the dead, it is
elevating the dignity of all of us by upholding this highest of Jewish
values. For that, it deserves the thanks of the living.
|
