As a young married woman (and I was young) in the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn in the late 1960s, I do not recall going to funerals. Once a body was prepared for burial, there was a tradition of women wailing very loudly as the deceased was driven past the house to the synagogue where most funerals take place and then to the cemetery. Women did not go to the cemetery either for the burial or on yahrzeits (even though yahrzeit is an Ashkenazi word, we do not have another word with the same meaning so we use this word to mark the anniversary of a death, as if it were an English word) or other occasions. Some families adhered to the custom of not visiting a house of mourning if they had not been to that person’s home previously for another occasion.
Forty years later, I can now see that there have been many changes in mourning practices. Today, Syrian women do attend funerals and houses of mourning and go to the cemetery for burials and yarzheits. The choice for a woman mourner to go to the cemetery is an individual decision. Today in this community there are often eulogies at the funeral given by family members, but women who write speeches almost always have them delivered by a male member of the family.
I have mourned for both parents and a sister in a way that is traditional in the Syrian Jewish community. My mother passed away in 1990 and my father in 1995. My older sister’s death occurred more recently, just three years ago. I did not go to the cemetery for the burials. I waited at the house of mourning for the men to return from the cemetery. After their return, our shirts were torn, we sat on the floor on pillows, and ate a hardboiled egg in pita bread. The men would fill the house twice a day for morning and evening prayers. I would be present when kaddish was said, but did not recite it myself. Hashkava, which is equivalent to Kel Maleh Rahamim for Ashkenazi Jews, is recited at the end of the service and has three parts. The first part accepts death as God’s decree; the second recites the name of the deceased using the mother’s name, and not the father’s which is the Ashkenazi custom; and the third gives consolation to the mourners. The Hashkava is also recited at the end of the shloshim and on yahrzeits. The names of mothers are sometimes engraved on tombstones in the Syrian community.
Today, women visit during shiva even when the person “sitting” is not someone very close to them and regardless of whether they had visited that person’s home previously. When visiting a shiva house, a guest is served a drink. There are fruits and nuts and a plentiful amount of other food on a table for the purpose of encouraging visitors to recite a berakha. This is different from the Ashkenazi custom of visitors not eating or drinking anything in a shiva house except if they have come from very far. Often, computerized notes with the Hebrew name of the morgue was located. It was not difficult to find a fellow student just after 9/11 willing to volunteer her time to perform this very special mitzva. In fact, the Red Cross had been turning people away because there were too many volunteers, and all the girls who had gone to hospitals to help on the day of the attacks found that there were few survivors who needed medical attention. People had either made it out safely, or they had not made it out at all.
What I did not know when I agreed to help my friend was anything about the nature of the mitzva of shmira or the reason for it. I quickly learned that our tradition teaches that a body is to be treated with the utmost respect and dignity in life and especially in death. The soul remains near the body and is aware of what transpires nearby. Tehillim comfort the soul, and a person’s physical presence protects the body from posthumous harm. However, in this case, we would not be able to see the bodies at all, but rather only glimpse them coming out of an ambulance and being wheeled to the morgue or to large refrigeration trucks. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein says that once the body is seen to be out of physical harm, it is sufficient to sit shmira on the same premises. As to whether or not a woman can sit shmira for a man or a man for a woman, exceptions were made in this case—because the bodies were mostly unidentifiable by gender—and because, since it took months to finish the Ground Zero cleaning process, there were hundreds of shifts to fill.
For almost eight months, hundreds of young men and women sat in that temporary morgue saying Tehillim. I wonder if, like me, they felt nervous every single time they walked into the morgue. Or if they shared these feelings—of getting lost in their own Tehillim, of warmth and caring from the firefighters and police officers who came to “keep their lost friends company,” or of connectedness with those sojourning souls. I remember that, each time my shift ended and I walked back onto the city streets, it took me a while to reconnect with the physicality of the world around me. Even now, New York is filled with the memory of souls. And as for me, I am eternally grateful to the Almighty that I had the opportunity to help fix some of the world’s injustices—at least for these victims.