Call for mourners draws scores of strangers
Holocaust survivor gets proper burial
Eddie Ford, a Holocaust survivor who died last week at age 85, was worried that he did not deserve a proper Jewish funeral, and he almost did not get one.
But thanks to a volunteer rabbi who had been visiting him in hospital, who asked on Facebook for a few mourners to reach the 10man quorum for Jewish acts of worship, Ford was dispatched with the prayers of perhaps 200 strangers who gathered to bury him in subzero temperatures at a cemetery north of Toronto.
“It’s like the purest act of kindness, the best people could offer,” said Zale Newman, who had been helping Ford reconnect with his ancestral faith.
Ford had only the most distant memories of his Jewishness. He sang as a child in the choir of the largest synagogue in Europe, Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest, and at the end of his life he still remembered the tune to some of those prayers. He was still a child during the Holocaust, when he was sheltered by a Christian family.
Before he became ill with the cancer that killed him, he lived in the heart of Toronto’s Jewish neighbourhood, but he remained “a little on the outside” of the community, Newman said.
“He asked me to teach him certain basics,” he said. “How could I not?”
So Newman, one of the few men who work with the mostly female Jewish Volunteer Services, started visiting him on Fridays in a palliative care ward of Sunnybrook Hospital. They would light electric candles, sing prayers, and discuss Eddie’s concerns, for example, that he had not observed kosher eating habits. He was wrongly afraid that this prevented him from having a Jewish funeral. He did not want to seem hypocritical.
But that is not a strict rule, so when he died last week, and a funeral home offered to cover the costs of the burial, which Newman would oversee, he was faced with a problem. How do you bury a person in the Jewish manner with no mourners to cast earth into the grave? As it stood, the service would not even meet the minyan, the quorum of 10 men required for Jewish acts of worship such as funerals.
So Newman posted a request on Facebook, and by the next morning, there were three people ready to go, plus him.
“Four is four. It’s better than one,” he said. So he set off driving to the cemetery.
What happened next is currently the subject of viral interest, in Israel especially.
Newman arrived to find the road blocked with cars. “Oh no, there’s another funeral,” he thought. So he started asking the people walking up the drive who they were there for. All of them answered, “Mr. Ford.”
Then he found the gravesite. “All I see is a hundred people dressed like ninjas,” bundled against the cold with scarves over their faces, Newman said. They were young and old, male and female, and as Newman put it, he saw both traditional beards and more progressive nose rings.
Word had even reached Ford’s brother, from whom he was long estranged, via a nephew who was the only relation Newman knew to contact. He came, and said that he too was no longer practising, but was assisted in saying the Kaddish prayer of praise.
So in the end, Ford “left a lot of inspiration in the world,” Newman said. In a message he posted to Facebook, he said: “My friends, yesterday I was afraid that I would perform a funeral for a charming Holocaust survivor without a minyan, in fact, without anyone else … How sad and amazing it is to be part of the Jewish people who, at short notice, would leave everything, go a long way, stand in an open field in a freezing wind to accompany a small Jew from Budapest, who was unknown to most of you, on his last journey.”