“Oh, one member died this week. One. But [burying him] was the most traumatic thing I’ve ever done. I was a filmmaker while I was burying him. I kept asking them, ‘Can you see? Is this what you want to be seeing?’”
Two weeks ago, Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, New York , performed her first virtual burial service. A member of her congregation had died at home of COVID-19, and because they were quarantined, his immediate family members — his wife and their two adult sons — were not able to travel to the cemetery. So Timoner went to the graveside and officiated the burial service by herself.
Early on, when we were looking at the data from Italy and China, I did the math. We are a congregation of a thousand families, so it would be 45 members. We usually lose between zero and five members in a year. So far it has been nowhere near those numbers. At all. More recently, though, the New York Board of Rabbis came out with different guidance, saying clergy should not attend burials at all. Family should go to the cemetery, and clergy should be there to officiate virtually. But because this member died at home, his wife and his adult sons who were staying with them were quarantined and could not leave the house. And so I was like, I’m breaking the rules. I’m going. His brother wanted to go, too, and I was like, I’ll stand far away.
It’s hard to see your loved one is in this box, and they are jostling it, and trying to have it fit in the grave, and they have these straps and they’re trying to lower it. When they’re done, they walk far away, and there’s nobody there. So then I approach — his brother is far behind me, he stands far away — and I’m thinking, What would the family do if they were here? They’d look in the grave. So I take the phone and started showing the edge of the grave and then the casket from above.
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