Grave memories
Three local high school students solemnly placed stones on the grave of a man they did not know. No comments yet. You can be the first!
The students, part of a Phoenix Country Day School group traveling in central and eastern Europe earlier this summer, had been asked to go to the cemetery in Prague by Holocaust survivor Helen Handler. The grave they visited was that of Handler’s father, Bernard Weinstein, who died almost a decade before Handler, her grandparents, her mother and her two brothers were swept up by the Nazis and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Handler is the only member of her family to survive; her father’s grave the only grave she has to visit.
Visiting a grave is an act of remembrance for Jews, leaving a stone on its surface an expression of respect for the deceased and a testament to the worth of that life. For a Holocaust survivor, whose family members were exterminated by the Nazis, there are no cemeteries to visit, no gravestones to mark. So the site of any grave is infused with the memories of all those who perished. That meaning was not lost on the youngsters
who honored Handler’s request and paid their respects at Weinstein’s grave in Prague, as retold in this week’s issue of Jewish News.
“This is the only member of her family who has a grave,” Jeremy Abdo, one of the students, told Jewish News.
Listening to Jeremy and later speaking to Helen, I could not help thinking of the story of Joseph’s bones, the Biblical recounting of Joseph’s request that his progeny “carry up my bones” and the ultimate fulfillment of that obligation almost 400 years later. The midrash tells how after Joseph’s death in Egypt, his remains are embalmed, buried in a river, exhumed as the Israelites are hurrying to flee from slavery with Pharoah’s soldiers in pursuit. The bones are transported through the 40 years wandering in the desert, eventually buried, so the book of Joshua tells us, in Shechem, in the Promised Land.
From slavery to freedom, from Egypt to Israel, the bones are carried, then buried, both a sign of respect for Joseph and the promise of the continuing Jewish story.
And while the obligation to bury the dead remains, so does the hope for the future endure, perhaps in the experience of a few students in Prague who paid their respects to the dead, placing a few stones on a grave, and understanding what it would mean to a survivor at home.
24 Jul, 2009 >