A cornerstone of the tahara prayers is the invocation of the name of the deceased several times during the ritual. We do so as we begin the tahara (literally “purification”—the process of preparing a Jew for burial according to Jewish law and custom), when we advocate for his or her soul before the Almighty, and finally when we ask forgiveness for any errors of omission or commission during the tahara. This positioning of the deceased in center stage underscores the undeniable identity and uniqueness of that individual.
Safeguarding individual identity has deep roots in Jewish tradition. Biblical commentaries compare the people of Israel to stars named by God. The Holocaust robbed the Jewish people of six million of its shining stars. They went to their deaths without shrouds, without memorial prayers, and without gravestones. Denied any form of individuality or dignity, most victims were sent nameless into mass graves. In researching my book on participation in hevra kadishas, I came across stories of women doing taharot and caring for the dead victims during the Holocaust under the most terrible conditions. Isolated incidents of individual burials accompanied by taharot represented a stunning departure during the Holocaust, a repudiation of the Nazi campaign of depersonification.
I discovered that when a formal hevra ceased to exist, family members or friends assumed this responsibility as best they could. Traditionally, the details of tahara were kept within the hevra kadisha; this lack of knowledge presented problems when there was no hevra available and members of the community had to attend to the dead themselves.
Eyewitness accounts of valiant attempts to do taharot and provide a proper Jewish burial in the Holocaust are an affirmation of faith and deserve to be heard.
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Rose Meth is a seventy-nine-year-old survivor of several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where, as a teenager, she was a member of a Jewish resistance group. Before the war, Rose’s father was head of the hevra kadisha in Zator, Poland, where he would accompany every deceased person to the cemetery, even when he was sick, because he considered the mitzva so important. During her internment in the Neustadt-Glewe concentration camp, Rose drew inspiration from her father’s memory, when called on to bury another inmate.
She recalls:
Odessa, one of the girls in the concentration camp, got up early one morning to look for food. She found a beet in a field and was returning to the camp when she was confronted by an SS officer who shot her on the spot. Word about her death soon reached the camp. The Kapo, who was responsible for guarding us, came and asked for volunteers to bury the girl. We were all starved, cold, and hungry and naturally reluctant to volunteer. But, I never forgot my father’s dedication to and reverence for the dead, and so I said I would help. Once I had volunteered, little by little, another seven girls said they would go.
The guard told us where we could find a board to carry Odessa and led us to where she had fallen. Dressed in her striped prison uniform, she had been shot in the head. We picked her up and placed her on the board. We divided into two teams, with four of us carrying the body at any given time. The distance we had to carry her was probably not very far, but we were in such weakened condition it seemed like an eternity. We changed places three or four times until we brought her to the corner of a cemetery.
We could see immediately that this was a Christian cemetery, but we had no choice. This is what we were ordered to do. Our guard supplied us with shovels, and we began to dig the grave. The digging also seemed endless. When we were through, we were ordered to throw the body into the pit. We then covered her with dirt and were escorted back to the camp. I felt a degree of satisfaction inasmuch as she was buried with at least some dignity, instead of simply thrown into a mass grave. However, I was very distraught about the fact that she was buried in a Christian cemetery.
At that time, I knew nothing about Jewish burial practices, except that my father was very respectful of the dead. I felt that by volunteering to bury her, I was following in his footsteps and honoring his memory.
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In my research, I found that some survivors became involved in the hevra kadisha after the war as a direct response to their wartime experience, in addition to being motivated by the great value placed on hesed in their pre-war homes. Lori Oppenheimer is one such example. A survivor from Germany, she remembers that during an air raid in 1941, the family hid in the mikva. Her father suffered a massive heart attack and died. As there were no takhrihim (burial shrouds), he was buried in a large white shirt instead.
After the war, she went to Amsterdam where the Organization for Rehabilitation and Training (ORT) taught her to be a seamstress. The family ultimately settled in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan in New York City, an enclave of German Jews, where she was approached by the president of the sisterhood of her synagogue to become a member of the hevra kadisha. Mrs. Oppenheimer clearly remembers the well-intentioned, but somewhat insensitive approach:
“Since you have seen so much death in the concentration camps, maybe you wouldn’t mind participating.” I agreed to do it. The after-effects of doing tahara were almost antiseptic compared to what I had witnessed during the war. I recalled specifically a young man who had stolen a piece of bread and was hanged in the marketplace. Seeing him hanging from the noose is something I will never forget.
Because I am an accomplished seamstress, I was soon approached to become the community takhrihim macher 1 . There was no pattern. But my ORT training came in handy, because I had also been taught to make patterns. I copied the pattern from a sewn set of takhrihim. Thirty years later, I still use the same pattern, even though it’s old and tattered.
In summing up her years in the hevra in America, Mrs. Oppenheimer said, “In the camps, death was a daily occurrence. You simply didn’t mourn, no shiva, no nothing. Dealing with death in a tahara is completely different—there is dignity and respect. In the ghetto and the concentration camp, people died deprived of any sanctity.”
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Nelly Blumner, an eighty-one-year-old Holocaust survivor now living in Queens, New York, spent the war years in five different concentration camps and on a death march. Her mother, a member of the hevra kadisha, died before the war. After liberation, Mrs. Blumner returned to Poland where she had last lived, but found no trace of her family. She received word that her three sisters, the only members of the family to survive, were in a hospital in Czechoslovakia. After much difficulty, Mrs. Blumner arrived at the hospital to find her sisters in very poor medical condition. The youngest, only seventeen, died of pneumonia. Mrs. Blumner, who was twenty-one at the time, recalls her dilemma:
So, what was I supposed to do? I remembered that my mother, who was a member of the hevra kadisha in Germany, had told us about washing the body. I also recalled that when she died the hevra ladies took care of her and that my older sister and I were only permitted to put the booties on her feet. As best as I knew how, I did the tahara on my little sister and then buried her. All by myself, I washed her with a sponge and water and then wrapped her in a piece of sheet I was able to get. The people of the village of Volary gave us one side of their church graveyard to bury our dead. Over ninety Jews are buried there.
My feelings at the time were indescribable. I was scared, worried and angry. You name it —I felt it. I did it because I knew something had to be done. I cried and talked to her while I did it. I was angry because I felt so alone. My other sisters were in the hospital, but they were not up to this task physically or mentally. I simply took over at that time. I was inspired to do it, and this inspiration enabled me to do it. The Red Cross and the American Army helped me to get the body to the churchyard. When I buried her I put a twig into each hand2 and covered her with another sheet. I think I also put a pebble on each eye. The American soldiers gave me a little prayer book and I said kaddish at the gravesite.
Mrs. Blumner returned to visit her sister’s gravesite, many years later after her husband retired.
Her grave was marked “Unknown.” I knew exactly the spot in which I buried her, so I had planned to have a stone engraved with her German name, Hebrew name, birth date, and date of death. When I got there and saw how all the other graves were marked only with a single name or “Unknown,” I had the engraver put her given name “Dora Ebbe” on it, nothing else. I didn’t want her to be different from all the others.
Following in her mother’s footsteps, Mrs. Blumner became involved in the Queens hevra kadisha when she came to the United States. She said, “The first few taharot I did brought back painful memories of the deaths of my mother and my sister. Most of all when I started, I felt I had done such a poor and incomplete job with my sister. I felt so guilty.”
When she spoke to the rabbi who was head of her hevra, he told her, “You have done all you knew and understood at the time and I’m sure Hashem has forgiven you. You need now to carry on your good deeds.”
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When I think of all these women did, how they struggled to care for the dead amid terror and tragedy and how they kept their faith in the importance of this mitzva, I am awed and inspired.
I myself joined a hevra kadisha after my father died in 1985. Becoming a hevra member radically changed my life. It is now one of the pivotal identities that define who I am: it has been added to my list of significant life roles—wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, social worker, writer, and friend. Participating in the egalitarian customs and ceremonies of burying the dead reaffirms an important personal tenet I learned from my father, a lifelong champion for equality and justice. It has also helped bring my own mortality into sharper focus. On a communal and spiritual level, I have come to consider my work with the hevra as the most profound expression of my Judaism. These services are rooted in our history and therefore link hevra members to past generations of Jews over the world. One of the links is to the Jews who died in the Holocaust and the courageous people who sacrificed to care for them.