It is a clear, starry night in October 2018, with the faintest hint of a chill in the air, and I am standing on a hilltop at a cemetery on the outskirts of Jerusalem. I have just arrived here from Washington, D.C. to bury my dear friend Zelda, who died in hospice care at my home a few nights earlier on Erev Shabbat. After a complicated and stressful few days, I am grateful to step out of the car and immediately spot the two uniformed IDF lone soldiers who are waiting for me: my son, a Paratrooper, and his girlfriend, a naval engineer. Joining them in awaiting the arrival of the body from the Ben Gurion Airport where we landed only a short time ago is a small group of Zelda’s friends and Israeli relatives. After three weeks of caring intimately for her, I am here to fulfill her last request—a last minute change to her will—that she be buried in her beloved Jerusalem.
My son and his girlfriend step forward to embrace me and I am relieved to be in the arms of these two young soldiers. In addition to the familial comfort they offer, they lend an imprimatur of legitimacy to my role in this undertaking. As the executor of Zelda’s estate—another last minute change to her will—I am invested with the responsibility to accompany her body to Israel and ensure her burial. After a brief service in the small synagogue, our group of about twenty mourners joins in the procession led by four members of the Chevra Kadisha (an organization that oversees the ritual preparation of deceased Jews for burial) to the grave site. The four black-clad Haredi men transporting the bier, upon which lies the body enshrouded in spotless white linen, carry lanterns to light our way. These lamps offer the only light beyond that provided by the illumination of the stars and the moon in the dark night sky and the eerie glow emanating from the warm, golden hues of the Jerusalem stone tombstones which surround us on both sides of the path that winds through the cemetery. Once we arrive at the newly dug grave, one of the men climbs down into it to receive Zelda’s body. The other three lower it into the grave, feet first and facing up. Next, they place concrete blocks above it, supported by a concrete frame that has already been prepared. These blocks do not touch the body, but together with the walls, form a sealed concrete chamber. This process is called “stimat ha-golal” (sealing the tomb). One of men then covers the blocks with a bit of earth and recites the following verse three times:
“וְהוּא רַחוּם יְכַפֵּר
עָוֹן וְלֹא יַשְׁחִית וְהִרְבָּה לְהָשִׁיב אַפּוֹ וְלֹא יָעִיר כָּל חֲמָתוֹ”
“But He, being merciful, will forgive iniquity and not destroy; He restrains
His wrath, and does not pour out His full fury.” (Psalms 78:38)
I feel as if I have traveled back in time 2,000 years. As we retrace our steps back to the synagogue, I marvel at the trajectory that brought me, this former Catholic girl now a non-religious Jew, to this particular time and place to fulfill this sacred and very Jewish task.
My Catholic father and Jewish mother raised my siblings and me Catholic, my mother having converted to Catholicism when she was pregnant with me, her second child. I broke definitively with Catholicism as a teenager not because I had turned to Judaism but, rather, when our parish priest refused to marry my pregnant 18-year old sister because her boyfriend was a Baptist. Growing up, I was mostly disconnected from my Jewish heritage. My siblings and I knew that our maternal grandmother and great-grandmother—widows both—our uncle, and my mother’s few aunts and uncles and their children were Jews, but they seemed to be so in name only. The Jewish side of the family, with its dark view of life and my inchoate sense that they carried some unspoken burden, was vastly different from my father’s side. The Catholic relatives, with my gentle Italian grandfather and feisty Irish grandmother at the helm, were more free, generous, and funny, and we saw them more often. In any event, when I was twelve we moved from the northern New Jersey shore to Bristol, Virginia, an Appalachian town in remote Southwestern Virginia. After that, my memories of the Jewish great-aunts and -uncles and second cousins grew dim and soon faded away almost entirely. But my maternal grandmother, Shirley, remained a fixed presence and, in many ways, the embodiment of my mother’s history.
Both sets of grandparents led lives characterized by poverty and hard work, but Shirley had the decidedly more difficult road. Abandoned by my grandfather who was later to commit suicide, Shirley singlehandedly raised my mother and uncle. She worked long hours in a factory that produced window screens and struggled to pay the rent on the small but spotless apartment (family legend has it that every time my father appeared at the apartment to pick up my mother for a date, the kitchen floor was wet because my grandmother had just mopped it) in the Newark housing projects where my mother and uncle lived until they each married. Shirley wasn’t exactly an atheist, but she had a hostile view of G-d as a troublemaker and the cause of her many woes. That may explain why she raised her children without imparting even the most nominal precepts of Judaism. However, according to my mother, this was not unusual; other Jewish families in the projects were similarly non-observant. Rather, radical assimilation was the prevailing ethos of these intentionally lapsed Jews. As a result, my mother and uncle grew into adults who knew little to nothing about Judaism. Like my mother, my uncle married a Catholic and his children were raised in the Church, although unlike my mother he never converted.
Growing up, I recall my mother telling me only one story reflective of her identity as a Jew. For the days and weeks leading up to my parents’ wedding, Shirley reportedly tried to talk my mother into calling it off, even offering her money to do so, solely because my father was not Jewish. The obvious inconsistency of this position, given her religious hostility and renunciation of even the secular markers of a Jewish life, was apparently lost on my grandmother. My grandmother never really forgave my mother for marrying a non-Jew. Indeed, the value Shirley placed on a Jewish husband was re-enacted when, in my mid-twenties, I brought home my first Jewish boyfriend. Discounting by implication my sisters’ earlier marriages to southern Christian men, Shirley encouraged me to marry “this one” because, as she put it: “even though he might eventually have girlfriends, a Jewish man will always stay with you and provide for his family.” Needless to say, I found this a dubious and ironic piece of advice given my late grandfather’s abandonment of and total failure to provide for his family.
Yet despite the scant markers of Jewish identity handed down to me, I have vivid memories of my maternal great-grandmother, who died when I was eight. Hiba (“Libby”) Goldgeyer, was 36 years old and a recent widow when, in 1920, she immigrated from Beltz, Romania to the United States with her three children, including my four-year old grandmother (then named Shlima). Through the auspices of an American Jewish organization, Libby procured a position as a child care provider and housekeeper for an upper middle-class Jewish family in New Brunswick, N.J. As children, my mother took my two sisters and me to visit Shirley and Libby at the apartment they shared. Unlike my grandmother who was short and plump but small-boned, Libby was a tall and large-boned woman. When we entered the apartment, Libby, by then blind, would call to my sisters and me from the kitchen and, when we ran to her, enfold us in her soft and welcoming arms. Once the hugs were dispensed with, she reached into the deep pocket of her immaculate, well-ironed, flower print apron and withdrew and pressed into our eager hands a quarter that she insisted we use to buy tsukerl. This Yiddish word for sweets was the only one I knew, so it was for me an auspicious sign at the time when, almost a quarter of a century later, I met my first husband whose surname is Zucker, German for ‘sugar’. While Libby could understand us, she spoke only Yiddish so my mother or grandmother had to translate her responses. My mother did not speak Yiddish, but she understood it; it was Shirley’s first language. Years later, when my parents had relocated her to Virginia to be near them, Shirley would speak Yiddish to my mother when she wanted to criticize other people and didn’t want them to know what she was saying. These were usually visiting neighbors and friends of my parents, as she had no compunction about complaining in English about us, her grandchildren or, as was most often the case, my beleaguered mother and perennially underappreciated father. As when I was a child, I marveled that my mother understood this strange-sounding tongue when, to my mind, there was seemingly nothing else Jewish about her.
It wasn’t until 1990 that I experienced my first Jewish life cycle event. Unpredictably, that event took place in Bristol, Virginia, and not in Washington, D.C. where, at age 32, I was living and working as a lawyer and had Jewish friends, boyfriends, and colleagues. Although my grandmother had previously told my mother that she wanted a Jewish burial, my parents did not give it much thought until she became seriously ill that summer and was hospitalized. When it became apparent that she had only a few days to live, they confronted the problem of arranging a Jewish burial in Bristol. There were few, if any, Jews in Bristol at that time; or at least none that we knew. The local funeral home could not, understandably, provide tahara (the traditional Jewish cleansing performed on a body before burial) or facilitate a burial within the requisite 24 hours. Nevertheless, it managed to obtain a halachic casket (a simple box made of wood without nails or hinges) from a funeral home about two hours away, in Knoxville, Tennessee, which served a small but established Jewish community there. It also provided contact information for a Knoxville synagogue that could provide a rabbi to officiate.
The next hurdle was where she would be buried. Much to my family’s surprise, we learned that there was a small, fenced Jewish cemetery—situated on a parcel of land sized for a single family home—in a neighborhood in Bristol where one of my brothers-in law had grown up. Research I did years later revealed that in September 1905, the tiny B’nai Sholom Congregation in Bristol paid $300 for this spot to be used as a Jewish cemetery. This cemetery of less than thirty graves was already, in 1990, close to full. The funeral itself took place on a blazingly hot July day. I remember little about the graveside service, except the novelty of the Hebrew prayers the rabbi recited and the strangeness of seeing, for the first time, my male family members wearing black kippot. It was hard not to laugh at my younger nephews whose polyester kippot, inexpertly perched toward the front of their heads, kept sliding down over their sweaty foreheads to cover their eyes.
Little did I know then that less than three years later, I would marry a Jew and commit to building a Jewish home. Indeed, within a year thereafter, my son was born and we celebrated his bris in our home. As I fretted over the reality of the ritual bloodletting that would take place imminently on my kitchen table, my mother-in-law and mother laid out heaping baskets of bagels, cream cheese, lox, egg and tuna salads, kugel, and rugeleh onto the dining room table. I would soon come to recognize these foods as standard Jewish fare at most holiday and life cycle events. Within another four years, we had joined a conservative shul and soon celebrated the naming of our newborn daughter there. But even as my immersion in my new life as a Jew deepened with each passing year, I struggled with what this new identity meant, especially from a religious perspective.
Unlike my mother’s childhood experience with Judaism, I was raised with a proper if not rigorous Catholic girlhood: catechism classes, a Holy Communion and Confirmation, observance of Catholic holidays and, until the National Conference of Bishops abolished the law of flesh meat abstinence in 1966, Friday night fish dinners. To this day, I can attend a Catholic mass and most of the liturgy comes back to me relatively easily. On the other hand, I am still largely in the dark when it comes to Saturday morning Shabbat services. While I am finally learning Hebrew, it is more because I anticipate Israeli grandchildren one day as my son makes his life in Eretz Yisrael than to read from the siddur. But if I failed to connect religiously to Judaism this past quarter century, I made up for it in my conscientious and joyful study of and immersion in Jewish culture and history. To this end, even as I was working full-time as an attorney, I recently completed a master’s program in Folklore Studies, where my research emphasized ethnographies of Jewish women.
Perhaps it was the Orthodox nature of Zelda’s burial and its spectacular setting that caused the question of my religious identity as a Jew to resurface with the intensity it did. In what for me is its most essential aspect, I struggle with Judaism much as I did with Catholicism. That is, how can I connect with any religion that exercises—indeed clings fiercely to—its patriarchal authority to marginalize and effectively subordinate women? And how is it that I can revel and take pride in my ever-expanding knowledge of Jewish literature, folklore, history, and cultural studies, yet instinctively balk, despite my best efforts otherwise, at a liturgy where the Feminine is so blatantly absent? I grapple with such questions even as I visit Israel regularly and, walking the streets of Jerusalem for hours at a time, feel more at home there than in any place I’ve ever visited.
Despite the many unanswered questions, I continue the arduous yet rewarding work of constructing and reconstructing my identity as a Jew. In so doing, I resituate myself proudly in a lineage of resilient Jewish women going back three generations and, going forward, into the next generation as embodied in my daughter, who identifies perhaps first and foremost as a Jew. I reflect too that when my son made Aliyah two years ago, he had to produce records attesting to his Jewishness through his maternal bloodline. This same matrilineality that establishes my children as Jews also binds my mother and me, and now my daughter, to each other and to my grandmother and great-grandmother, may their memories be a blessing.
