| 6-June-99 Harry's Unveiling
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. Well, where I was today isn't in my usual stomping grounds either. Just why my sister Hanna wanted to be responsible for our grandpa Harry's funeral isn't clear to me. Our aunt has lots more financial resources and would have been willing to take care of it. At any rate, the funeral was back in January, and today was the unveiling of the tombstone. The only time I had been to the cemetery was for the funeral, and I didn't think I could find it on my own; so I drove out to Hanna's house in Worcester, an hour from here, and was just in time to ride with them and a neighbor from their congregation. We drove past the Worcester Airport and the modern industrial park around it, a couple of blocks along a street with older brick and cinder block business like auto body shops, down an old residential street, and finally steeply uphill on Havana Street. Back in January the funeral had been delayed a day because Havana Street was a sheet of ice and you couldn't get up it to the cemetery. Today was a beautiful June day and the ice was hard to remember. A couple of cement pillars that might once have held an arch marked the entrance, and we parked on the street next to them. The gravesite was right at the corner of the cemetery , across the street from a couple of houses, with an overgrown woods down the hill ahead, a view out over more woods and tombstones behind, everything bright green in the early summer. The four of us walked over. Before we had time to wonder where other people were, we saw the Rabbi and five other members of the congregation picking their way between tombstones coming up the hill to join us. Is it in Annie Hall where Woody Allen has a flash of what he looks like to his girlfriend's family? I hate to admit it, but that's not all that bad a picture of the Rabbi. He was about five foot five, rotund, with a long long wispy gray beard, dressed in black suit and a big black hat -- not a stovepipe hat, but one with a conical crown, flat on top. Let's see. There was Ira, the neighbor, the rabbi and five members of the congregation (I think I'm probably counting the synagogue or cemetery caretaker -- one man was wearing jeans and a workshirt and looked more accustomed to physical labor), and me. That made nine men. Hanna said “I spoke with <name> and he should be right along,” and he was a minute later, so we could start. There are some prayers you don't say unless there are ten people present, and the Orthodox tradition is “ten men,” so Hanna, though she was really the moving force of the whole event, couldn't count herself. The Rabbi chanted “Eil Molei Rachamim, God full of mercy, have mercy on the spirit of Herschel ben Yosef ... ”(Hanna! when you see this, give me the right name for goodness sake! It may be a schande that I don't know my grandfather's real Hebrew name, but I don't) and had Hanna and me together remove the cheesecloth veil from the stone. Then he gave a brief homily about how what Hanna and Ira had done here was a true act of mercy and kindness, something for which there was no reward in this world but just one of those things you do. Ira recited the kaddish, the traditional prayer in honor of the dead for which you need the quorum of ten, with the rest of us saying "amen" at the right times. We shook hands all around, and that was it. Hanna had a couple of stories to tell on the way to and from the cemetery. I'll just put down a word to remind me of each and come back to fill them in another time. Ha ha! To keep you in suspense, I'll remind myself in Yiddish and Hebrew.
Hanna's stories:
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