Jewish cemetery facing a strain as virus toll climbs
Staff works around clock to keep up with burials
In recent days, Rabbi Shmuel Plafker has found himself contemplating the haunting liturgy chanted during Judaism’s high holiday prayer services:
On Rosh Hashana it is inscribed... how many shall be born and how many shall die ... who by water and who by fire ... who by earthquake and who by plague.
Plafker, the chaplain of the Hebrew Free Burial Association at Staten Island’s Mount Richmond Cemetery, admits that he never thought much about plagues. “It was just a word in my prayer book,” said the Brooklyn native. Then came COVID-19.
The past few weeks have brought grave losses for Jews in New Jersey and New York, home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities as well as one of the globe’s deadliest outbreaks. At Mount Richmond, a final resting place for Jews without the funds to pay for their own funeral, staff are working around the clock to keep up with the grim statistics.
“After you do 10 burials in a day, that’s when the exhaustion sets in,” said Plafker. The Hebrew Free Burial Association, which operates the 25-acre cemetery, typically conducts about 360 interments annually. But in the first three weeks of April alone, 136 burials were conducted, nearly four times the number during the same time last year.
The dead were predominantly Jewish victims of coronavirus from the local region.
Andrew Parver, the association’s director of operations, remembered setting a record several years ago when the group conducted seven burials in a day.
“We were stunned,” said Parver, who lives in New Milford, New Jersey. “We didn’t know how we would pull it off.”
The surge has had a dramatic impact: Staff members are working longer hours, the association’s supply of taleisim, prayer shawls in which Jews are buried, has dwindled and the cemetery ran out of space in its storage refrigerators for corpses, said Amy Koplow, the group’s executive director.
The nonprofit Burial Association was established in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1888 with the mission of tending to immigrant Jews unable to pay funeral expenses. The largest Jewish free burial society outside of Israel, it has provided a final sanctuary for Holocaust survivors and refugees from the Soviet Union, and, a century ago, for victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Spanish flu. And, most recently, coronavirus.
“If you would have told me two months ago that I would be doing this many burials a day, I would have thought you were crazy,” said Plafker. He dons a protective suit and gloves before funerals now, delivering memorial prayers through his face mask.
The association makes room only for Jews who are financially eligible.
The association’s dozen employees have been working long hours (except for the Sabbath and Jewish holidays) since the pandemic began.
“This is not just a job for me. It’s a sacred mission,” said Parver.