By Noa Amouyal
Rabbi Wagner and Rabbi Goldstein at Chabad of West Houston
Danny Carson had decided that he was going to be cremated long before he passed away. But an unlikely pair of Rabbis – his nephew from Texas and a stranger from Germany – had convinced him otherwise.
“Danny Carson wasn’t overly observant of Judaism,” Rabbi Dovid Goldstein, co-director of Chabad of West Houston, said. When Goldstein and his wife, Elisa, moved to West Houston, the rabbi made it a point to have a relationship with this side of the family, despite their distance from religion. To that end, Goldstein found ways to respect their wishes but also introduce certain mitzvot into their home.
That’s why he wasn’t surprised and initially didn’t object when he got a call from his aunt saying that Carson had died and the funeral would be a perfunctory service, followed by his body being cremated.
“When my aunt told me about the cremation, I asked if this was a matter up for discussion, and she said ‘no.’ So I decided to drop it,” he said.
The Carson family would have gone through with their plans if it wasn’t for Rabbi Yitzchak Mendel Wagner, Rabbi of the Jewish Community of Krefeld, Germany, who was touring the Houston community. Over lunch, Rabbi Goldstein told him about the cremation, which Rabbi Wagner took as a call to action.
“But when I overheard this conversation, the leaf landed. I realized that there was no reason for my visit to Texas other than to stop this cremation.
The argument that drove the point home was a key component in Wagner’s lecture about what Nazis did to the bodies of dead Jews. “They burned us. Just like the terrorist did on Oct. 7. We can’t allow our fellow Jews to inflict the same brutality our enemies did to us.”
It was that argument that Goldstein believes may have swayed his aunt to change her mind. “I texted my aunt and said I’m sitting next to a German rabbi who is an expert on Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. He is devastated every day that Jews were cremated in the ovens. He is pleading with you to not do what the Nazis did,” Goldstein recalled.
“That morning, she texted me saying she’ll ask the funeral director to delay the cremation and that I should try to make arrangements for a Jewish burial if I could help get the community to assist with the cost.”
It took a few hours, but Goldstein was able to secure a proper Jewish burial through the generosity of the Jewish Family Services of Houston.
“In all honesty, if Rabbi Wagner didn’t nudge me, I would have let the matter go. I’ve stopped cremations before, of course, but I didn’t want to fight with my own family,”. “At the end of the funeral, my aunt came up to me and said she was so happy we did this for him. She didn’t have the money. She revealed that when I first messaged her, she was upset and talking about the Holocaust touched a nerve. But she took the time to process what I told her and realized it was the right thing to do.”
“Ultimately, this is what the Lubavitcher Rebbe empowered the shluchim to do. We’re here to serve every Jew”.
As for Wagner, “I knew we’d be successful because Hashem put me here for this. The lesson here is that if a message comes to you, it is your obligation to take action.”
From Chabad.org
