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by: Jonathan Mark
When the Messiah comes, I’ll leave it to others
to gather quotes from presidents and kings. I’ll stake out a spot on the
far side of the Verrazano-Narrows, down lost roads in Staten Island,
where 55,000 of the hardest-luck Jews that ever walked in New York now
sleep on Mount Richmond until the rising of the dead.
The day they died may have been the first time they ever caught a break,
for it was in death that the Hebrew Free Burial Association buried them
with the dignity of a Jewish farewell instead of a potter’s field.
Six days a week, more often than not, Rabbi Shmuel Plafker, bald and
slender, digs a shovel into soft earth and buries another of us, about
one a day. A third of the time, there’s no one else but the rabbi, the
crows and a casket.
Not that long ago, an old woman was buried through Hebrew Free Burial.
She had a sister, “all that was left from their family,” Rabbi Plafker
says. “We’d send her mail, but it started coming back. We discovered she
passed away and through a bureaucratic foul-up was buried in a non-Jewish
cemetery. We made the proper applications for her to be reburied here.
Where she was, they start burying people at Level A — way, way down. She
was on a higher level; Level F. That’s how they do it in that pauper’s
grave, several people deep. Here she was buried in her own individual
grave, near her sister, with a nameplate. Her name was Esther.”
Then there was the time a deaf Jewish man, unable to advocate for
himself, died without family and almost ended up as a medical school cadaver,
before the Hebrew Free Burial caught up with him, washed his 86-year-old
body like he was King David and dressed him in a beautiful shroud to
await the Son of Jesse.
The Dickensian end of the indigent dead is more contemporary than you
might think. The New York Times reports that in New Paltz, N.Y., a
swimming pool and recreation complex the size of a football field was
knowingly built in the 1970s over a potter’s field of 2,500 orphans,
paupers, mentally handicapped and strangers. Skulls, pelvic bones and
jaws have been picked up on the grounds. One lone headstone was found,
for Rebekah Brower: “Wher’ neath the cold damp earth lay, and sleep in
quiet day by day, and have no more on earth to say, who’ll weep for me?”
The Times reports this week that the county legislature voted to research
the old grounds and put up a monument, but “A few residents have
complained that it is a waste to spend public money studying dead people
who never amounted to much alive.”
Those who crossed over on Sept. 11 will have their names immortalized on
walls and pages, but already tens of thousands have been born since that
autumn morning and remember nothing, even as we debate memory’s best
vessel. In fact, that morning’s dead had the blessing of dying in a
circumstance that gave innocent victims the hyperbolic garland of heroes,
their resting place hallowed.
What of those who leave this world without spectacle or even neighborhood
sorrow, without a storyline known to another, untelevised, unnoticed? How
long should one remember the dead, and who has the responsibility to
remember? Sometimes, a grandchild will be seen in Mount Richmond, looking
for, well, himself, you might say. He might have heard that when his
family came to America there was a brother that died, a sister in the
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory where Jews flew through the air away
from the flames. There’s a whole garden of individual gravestones here
with flowery script for ladies that “perished in the fire,” when their
burial was left to Hebrew Free Burial.
Somewhere, someone once cried for Teibe bat Reb Aharon, aged 17, “beloved
sister. Perished in the Triangle Fire, 1911.”
We look for the dead; they look for us. They’re in the Other World, but
often enough in this one. It’s a Jewish tradition to go to the cemetery
and invite them to weddings. We see them at family tables; in our pews
and playgrounds; lost lovers even see them in bed. As surely as radio and
television images move invisibly over our sidewalks but filling the
silent air with songs and stories, the dead and the holy ones travel
among us, with songs and stories all their own.
We imagine the dead talking to us, but what of the dead babies who left
before their first word, before their first birthday, babies carried by
parents through a midnight fever? On Mount Richmond are fields and fields
of Jewish babies (the cemetery, which opened in 1909, is divided, as was
once traditional, into separate sections for men, women, and children).
Hundreds of babies are without headstones after 80 years in the earth.
The roads of the dead are muddy and narrow. Gregory Schwartzman, a
wizened old steamship worker, now the cemetery caretaker, put down
bumpers and reflectors along the roads, “so people won’t drive on the
graves. It’s very close, the road to the graves.” He drives out to a
stack of stone that he’ll lay down as a foundation for the babies’ headstones.
As the money is raised, at least 250 granite headstones are purchased
once a month (3,000 a year) from a granite quarry in the distant Georgia town
of Elberton. Each baby’s stone weighs 180 pounds. Each new stone is
engraved with the Hebrew abbreviation for po nishmat, “Here lies the
soul:” Shmuel Berenson 1917-1917; Nathan Abramowitz 1913-1917; Meyer Katz
1917-1917; Woodrow Wilson Fox 1918-1918; Sam Grand 1915-1916; Gussie
Schon 1916-1917; Pauline Haas 1914-1915; Helen Berezowsky 1915-1917;
Helen Rita Barr 1917-1918; Selma Zekofsky 1918-1918; Male Child Binder
1915-1915.
Rabbi Plafker has an old accountant’s ledger book, the pages dog-eared
and frayed, the binding held together with gray tape. From the old book,
a chronicle of burials, he figures out which headstone goes where.
Scattered among the new stones, are those few old stones which someone
could afford for the pitiful: Hayeled Yisroel Avraham, son of Yitzchak
Zvi, Dec. 5, 1912 - July 16, 1917, a stone in the shape of a tree stump
cut too soon.
And what of the babies who lived and lost a mother — Channa bat Shimon,
“beloved mother, died Jan. 21, 1917.” Perhaps the only sadder thing than
a child losing a parent is the terror of a dying parent leaving a child.
In the End of Days there’ll be a rising, on the edge of town in a field
of stone.
E-mail: Jonathan@jewishweek.org.
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