Fifty years ago I became a military widow when my husband of three years was killed in the Six Day War. I was pregnant with our first child. I was a young wife, 23 years old. I saw my husband before his death. Burnt beyond recognition, he was desperately gasping for air. I looked for…
CHICAGO (JTA) — A Jewish family is suing a Chicago-area funeral home for botching a burial so badly that the casket toppled and splintered in the grave, exposing the deceased’s white shroud to a gathering of over 100 traumatized mourners. After three months of trying unsuccessfully to settle the case, the family of tax attorney…
“Daniel’s bright smile brought joy to many,” read the obituary for Daniel “Ae Roo” Beer, an 11-year-old who died Monday at Jewish summer camp and was mourned at a New Jersey funeral Wednesday. “Tennis, swimming, piano, basketball, soccer and of course video games were some of the favorite things Daniel enjoyed,” the obituary continued, touching…
We were living in Dublin when the first emergency phone call came in. My father, then 80, was heading into surgery in Baltimore. They ended up removing a lung and reaming out important arteries full of cancer. In my mind’s eye I saw the rogue cells that would then pump through his body and lodge…
Starting today, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) will begin a five day performance run one of the all time great “lost works” of music – Igor Stravinsky’s “Chant Funebre” (Funeral Song). The piece, a short orchestral work, was written in 1908 on the occasion of the death of Stravinsky’s mentor Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. As the story goes,…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — More than 200 Israelis attended the funeral of a complete stranger — a Holocaust survivor from the Canary Islands who was buried in a Tel Aviv cemetery. Hilde Nathan’s final wish was to be laid to rest in Israel alongside her mother, the United With Israel organization said on its website. Nathan, who…
The grave of Sofiya Romm, a doctor who immigrated to the United States from Moscow, is hard to find in Ahavath Achim Anshe Sfard, the local Jewish cemetery here. On a recent afternoon in November, only Romm’s first name was visible. The rest of the inscription was under a pile of brown autumn leaves. You…
We often hear stories about how hard life was for Jews in Russia back in the day. Still, after they passed away, even poor Jews in the Russian Empire got to have gravestones. If you travel around Ukraine and Poland these days, you’ll stumble upon Jewish cemeteries in almost every village where Jews used to…
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