Goats And Ghosts In A Graveyard Visiting the dead on eve of Rosh HaShanah.
In the bitter winter of 1888, as New York’s poorest and loneliest Jewish immigrants were increasingly buried anonymously in potter’s field, without regard for their dignity or Jewish tradition, the Hebrew Free Burial Association was formed to take responsibility for every Jew too poor to be buried like “a mensch.” It purchased six acres on Staten Island in 1893, and within 16 years Silver Lake Cemetery was filled to capacity with 13,000 Jewish souls, including thousands of children. The dead were brought by ferry and by horses and buggies clip-clopping over dirt roads through the hills of Staten Island.
More than a century after its last funeral, who remembers, let alone visits this crowded tenement of a graveyard? Time has been a vandal; some graves are without stones, with poor water drainage below the soil and wild vines and poison ivy above it. With the help of a donor or two, the Hebrew Free Burial Association, still alive, brought in experts to heal and renovate and map the graveyard: geo-physicists, archaeologists, landscape architects, using old maps and yellowed ledger books — and goats. For several weeks, over these last two years, 22 goats were brought to Silver Lake to happily eat the thick shrubbery and poison ivy (to which goats are immune).
It is Elul, days, hours, before Rosh HaShanah, and the clock is ticking on the living. Each week's candle lighting is earlier: 7:08; 6:56; 6:44… In the vespers of a year losing its light, there are few Elul customs more compelling than visiting the dead. After all, as the prayers remind us, some of us will be among them before September comes again.
