Shiva
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Community I always sang for my father
My father, a fan of life, music and his home state politician Joe Biden, died soon after the first case of Covid-19 was reported in Delaware — although fortunately not of Covid-19. He was felled by “natural causes,”also known as the physical vicissitudes of old age. Dad’s death was not unexpected, but because of the…
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Community This isn’t about the bagel, nor the seltzer man
For me, it was a bagel – my last taste of normalcy before the “new normal” arrived, eaten mere hours before NYC effectively cancelled the school year for my children. The inevitable was fast approaching — had arrived in fact — and I was just slow to accept it. (Weeks later, my dad would die….
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Community ‘Zoom shiva is shiva distilled to its essence’
I am one of those people with one of those stories. My mom, 83, went into the hospital in early April with something relatively routine. A few weeks and complications later, she went to a rehab to regain her strength. My dad delivered her reading glasses and an everything bagel to the door, knowing, of…
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Community Sitting shiva via Zoom, it turns out, has its upsides
Last week, we buried my father in the Long Island cemetery plot that had been waiting three decades for him to arrive. When I recall my mother’s 1990 funeral, in the pre-COVID era, I can still feel the love that came from the crowd surrounding us, and the support I drew from the Hebrew prayers…
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Community My mother was a Holocaust survivor, but she was always more worried about my happiness.
My 93-year-old mom, who survived the Holocaust, died of COVID-19 in an assisted living facility in New Jersey on April 5. I found out she was dead from a text with the words Baruch Dayan Haemet, the Jewish blessing at the time of death. Only days earlier, my nephew called to tell me she had…
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News How to sit shiva while social distancing
For centuries, sitting shiva has provided Jewish mourners a meaningful ritual to gain closure after the death of a loved one. When you’ve just suffered a loss, it’s supremely comforting to have other people around — people to keep you fed, people to play with your kids, people with whom to share treasured family stories….
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Opinion Editorial | We’re going to have to show up without showing up
I paid a shiva call Friday morning. It was a somewhat absurd thing to do, in the hours before President Trump officially declared a national emergency, in this new era of social distancing: trek across state lines from my home in Montclair, N.J., to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was also the most…
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Fast Forward As many as 100 shiva attendees exposed to coronavirus in Maryland
One of three residents of Montgomery County, Md. who contracted the coronavirus on a cruise in Egypt attended a Jewish mourning ritual at a retirement community before before getting diagnosed with the disease and exposed between 70 and 100 attendees to it. In the ritual, known as sitting shiva, family members of the deceased receive…
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