This article traces the rise of twentieth-century private Jewish funeral homes in New York City. It argues that as Jewish New Yorkers accepted modern American standards of death, most did not lose ...sight of key Jewish funeral customs. Instead they reimagined them, retaining certain core traditions while addressing new legal, medical, or professional demands reshaping the city's funeral industry. Although some long-standing Jewish practices faced new obstacles, a new class of professional Jewish undertakers emerged at the turn of the century to help navigate that process. Some specialized in the performance of the Jewish funeral rite, while others commoditized their willingness to offer mortuary services as Jews without imposing religious practice. Looking to a broad array of Jewish New Yorkers, including immigrants, native-born, traditionally inclined, or adamantly secular, this article argues that most typically honored core Jewish practices as they aspired to modern American funeral sensibilities. Together, Jewish funeral directors and their clients forged new ways for Jews to deal with death in America. At the same time, they created a framework that not only preserved aspects of Jewish funeral practice into the future, but also did so, perhaps ironically, through that most modern of American ideals: market consumerism.
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A revealing look at how death and burial practices
influence the living Dust to Dust offers a
three-hundred-year history of Jewish life in New York, literally
from the ground up. Taking Jewish ...cemeteries as its subject matter,
it follows the ways that Jewish New Yorkers have planned for death
and burial from their earliest arrival in New Amsterdam to the
twentieth century. Allan Amanik charts a remarkable reciprocity
among Jewish funerary provisions and the workings of family and
communal life, tracing how financial and family concerns in death
came to equal earlier priorities rooted in tradition and communal
cohesion. At the same time, he shows how shifting emphases in death
gave average Jewish families the ability to advocate for greater
protections and entitlements such as widows' benefits and funeral
insurance. Amanik ultimately concludes that planning for life's end
helps to shape social systems in ways that often go
unrecognized.
This article traces the rise of twentieth-century private Jewish funeral homes in New York City. It argues that as Jewish New Yorkers accepted modern American standards of death, most did not lose ...sight of key Jewish funeral customs. Instead they reimagined them, retaining certain core traditions while addressing new legal, medical, or professional demands reshaping the city's funeral industry. Although some long-standing Jewish practices faced new obstacles, a new class of professional Jewish undertakers emerged at the turn of the century to help navigate that process. Some specialized in the performance of the Jewish funeral rite, while others commoditized their willingness to offer mortuary services as Jews without imposing religious practice. Looking to a broad array of Jewish New Yorkers, including immigrants, native-born, traditionally inclined, or adamantly secular, this article argues that most typically honored core Jewish practices as they aspired to modern American funeral sensibilities. Together, Jewish funeral directors and their clients forged new ways for Jews to deal with death in America. At the same time, they created a framework that not only preserved aspects of Jewish funeral practice into the future, but also did so, perhaps ironically, through that most modern of American ideals: market consumerism.
Full text
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“Is that an undertaker shop,” several onlookers puzzled, “and do the people down here use unpainted pine coffins for their dead?” On Hester Street in 1895, visitors to Lower Manhattan struggled to ...make sense of a carpenter’s shop that also sold Jewish funeral wares. The coffins “had no lining,” they recoiled, and “there were pine shavings in the bottom of some and they had not even been planed or smoothed with any care.” Pity overcame one visitor: “How pathetic for these exiled Jews to be so poor that they must bury their dead in this fashion!” “Not so; not so!”
Conclusion Amanik, Allan
Dust to Dust,
12/2019, Volume:
7
Book Chapter
When the dust settled after three centuries of Jewish interment on and around Manhattan Island, New York’s Jewish burial enterprise looked very different in the 1960s than it had on first breaking ...ground in 1656. Dutch officials and the Jewish settlers to whom they sold a small hook of land for their dead would have looked on in disbelief at the thousands of Jewish cemetery holdings threading New York’s cemetery belt as far as the eye could see. Early nineteenth-century families that had pled for the right “of being near to those in death, we loved most to be near
Introduction Amanik, Allan
Dust to Dust,
12/2019, Volume:
7
Book Chapter
One can only wonder if Joseph Myers (1802– 62), who was raised by his grandmother and uncle in Richmond, Virginia, ever visited his father’s grave in Lower Manhattan. If Joseph did make that ...pilgrimage before 1821, he would have found Samson Myers isolated from most of the graveyard’s other interments. Any comfort from paying respects to the father he had never known may have battled with the knowledge that his own birth—to a Christian mother and possibly out of wedlock—had led synagogue elders to separate his Jewish father’s grave.¹ This assumes, of course, that Myers was aware of
It was an odd scene at the Jews’ graveyard when Henry Phillips, alone, laid his son to rest. No procession, no ceremony, and no gathering of local Jews accompanied him. Phillips acted quickly, just ...three hours after telling synagogue leaders of the boy’s death. He buried his son on his own because trustees would have refused him otherwise. Phillips had strong convictions and a history of challenging authority. Had he predicted his son’s death, he may have paid his synagogue dues, already £4.17 in arrears. Without that contribution, however, he had forfeited interment rights for himself and his family. Trustees
Boarding dedicated ferries from Manhattan to Williamsburg, eager New York Jews set off in 1851 to claim a piece of heaven on earth in the beautiful new Salem Fields Cemetery. The Reform Temple ...Emanu-El had just completed Salem Fields, and its leaders aimed to showcase America’s first Jewish rural cemetery. Beautiful views, natural landscapes, and spatial innovations, they hoped, would inspire Jewish families to choose Emanu-El for eternal repose. More importantly, trustees gambled that “choice lots” for family burial would prove their crowning achievement. The congregation orchestrated a two-day auction event to promote those lots and advertised special rates every
Wives and Workingmen Amanik, Allan
Dust to Dust,
12/2019, Volume:
7
Book Chapter
“Buried cheaply!” rang the damning critique. By the 1870s, as Jewish lodge affiliation outpaced synagogue membership, uneasy onlookers belittled popular funeral benefits driving New York Jewish ...fraternalism. Defenders of the synagogue chastised Jewish fathers who saw no need to join congregations because societies would provide their funeral. Such men would save time, they thought, by avoiding congregation duties. More important, they would save money by avoiding congregation dues. While annually it might cost them $50 to belong to a synagogue, they could secure society membership for just a tenth of that expense. Nonetheless, critics warned that the long-term costs far
