Rabbi Shmuel Plafker remembers the case of Ira Schildman, a mentally-, hearing- and speech-impaired man who died at a Far Rockaway rehab center. He was days away from having his unclaimed body harvested for its organs when HFBA intervened to give Mr. Schildman a traditional Jewish burial. Only the volunteer minyan showed up.
Every year HFBA buries scores of people like Ira Schildman who leave this world with no one to mark their passing. “If there’s no one to ask what this person did in their life, or what they enjoyed, there’s nothing I can say,” says HFBA chaplain Rabbi Plafker. “Sometimes we don’t know a person’s Hebrew name. When someone dies alone, and we don’t have a minyan to say kaddish, all I can do is say Kel Maleh Rachamim, the prayer for the soul of the departed and some psalms.”
The rabbi says that sometimes it’s just him, the workers, and the deceased. “We try to find someone connected to the departed, perhaps a disabled relative or friend who can’t come to the cemetery,” Rabbi Plafker says. “I’ll get them on the phone and ask if they can say something about their loved one. I might even just hold up my phone so they can hear the ceremony. In the sad event that no one is present, we remain committed to doing the burial with the greatest respect.”
An experience Rabbi Plafker had in his early days as HFBA chaplain cemented his commitment to doing his best on behalf of each individual who “had a life.”
A Cold, Rainy November Day
“It was a cold, rainy November day at Mount Richmond Cemetery,” he recalls. “We had four women to bury. None of them had any relatives. The mud kept sliding into the graves. When the last funeral ended, I went to the office and said, ‘That was terrible.’
“I got the biggest lesson of my life from the funeral director, who was not Jewish.
‘Terrible?’ he echoed me. ‘Those four women might have been buried anywhere, including a potter’s field.’
“The funeral director brought home to me the real point of what we were doing. ‘You gave these women a proper Jewish burial,’ he said. I keep that in mind with each person entrusted to me.”
Reprinted from the Fall 2023 edition of The Hebrew Free Burial Association magazine Chesed.
