Tag Archives: funerals

February 24, 2025 · 7:30 am

Saying Kaddish for an Unworthy Parent

By Karin Joy Sprecher (Newton, MA)

Dear Friend,

Though I could not attend your Shiva in person – my husband stood there for both of us – I’ve thought of you every day since our conversation when you borrowed my mother-in-law’s wheelchair.

Funerals are never easy. Shivas are even more difficult, especially when the relationship was less than ideal or even fraught and sad and painful. 

How does one sit Shiva for someone who often caused us pain? How does one say Kaddish for a parent who was also mean, nasty, down-right abusive?  Two different rabbis and a cantor, in different ways, gave me essentially the same message: try sitting Shiva & saying Kaddish not for who that parent actually was. Instead, try sitting Shiva … try saying Kaddish for the parent you did not have, but that every child deserves.

I had my doubts.

But I was truly surprised that, over time, it felt not only like something I could do.  It felt right! 

What the rabbis and cantor specifically said — that there was a place in Jewish practice which not only acknowledged imperfect, damaging parenting and how that affected one’s ability to follow Jewish rituals for death and mourning — eventually became, for me, very powerful.  It enabled me to find solace in rituals which originally seemed inappropriate, even untenable.

It gave me a place to sit with other mourners in community, even if my feelings were different, even if my raison d’être for being there was the opposite of what others were experiencing.

Over time I remembered there were other warm, loving, nurturing adults in my life who, intentionally or not, filled a parent-like role in my life. Those who became role models for good parenting. Those who enabled me to become the kind of parent I wanted to be … the kind of parent I needed to be … for my children … because  I saw the way they parented their children. 

I saw that their children felt seen, were nurtured, were loved just as they were, whose strengths were appreciated and whose negative behaviors were lovingly redirected. I saw what was possible, and I saw its wonderful effects. I saw what I believe every child needs and deserves.  And, through parenting my own children, I finally realized that I was becoming the parent I deserved to have as a child.

By the end of saying Kaddish, I gratefully realized that there were people in my life who truly loved me, nurtured me, just as I was. They were my “real” parents, just not my biological parents.

Karin Joy Sprecher, an artist specializing in Judaica, was inspired to begin writing again the year before Covid shut everything down thanks to a Hebrew College class  “Writing Through a Jewish Lens: A Jewish Women’s Writing Workshop.”  She lives with her husband in Newton, MA, where she continues to sing, virtually, in Jewish choirs and take online classes in Jewish and secular subjects.

4 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

December 16, 2024 · 7:30 am

On That Day

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

It rained that day. The gray sky 

matched everybody’s mood

and as my face was pelted 

with large, heavy drops that hurt,

I reassured myself that I would never cry. 

I was almost 10.

I stood lost in the crowd. I didn’t 

have a need to be up front

but someone nudged me, 

pushed me closer to the grave

and I looked down and saw

the plain pale brown coffin 

decorated with a matching 

Jewish star, the place in which

my mother slept (that was the current 

euphemism), and I was numb. 

An old man speaking through 

his beard, dressed in a long black coat, 

a rabbi whom I’d seen in my rare visits 

to Temple Emanuel in Parkchester when 

certain holidays occurred, said words 

I didn’t understand, made noises 

that offered a young child no comfort, 

and sporadically others, most of which 

I didn’t recognize because my family had chosen 

isolation as a way of life. He mumbled what I guessed

were prayers, and all I felt was the heavy rain that

seemed determined to replace the tears that wouldn’t come.

I paid attention to my heavy breathing 

because, I guess, it took my mind away 

from that pine coffin that held what was left 

of the woman who used to comfort and care for me 

when I was sick, who used to cook for me in her 

Jewish-Latvian way, from scratch to tasty,

with the constantly secret sacred ingredient 

being love.

I had been her companion as she prepared the food,

the one who licked the bowl … but what exactly 

was my role now that she was gone? Who would be

my mother? A little child needed a mother, but she was gone.

These thoughts bombarded my defenselessness

while wise men said their Hebrew words and still 

the tears refused to visit me, and the rain kept falling 

and the shovels lifted senseless dirt and dropped it 

on my mother and I felt like screaming and running 

to her but she was no longer there for me. Instead, 

the sounds replaced her voice, those holy sounds 

that meant nothing to a ten-year-old, 

a boy who simply wanted to hear

his mother’s voice again.


Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

2 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

May 6, 2024 · 7:30 am

Thirsty roots

by Jane Schulman (New York, NY)

We buried my father on a rise  

under a jack pine where steam rose 

from the fresh-dug grave, colliding  

with January air.  

My sons unloaded the casket  

from the back of a pickup and walked it  

to the open grave, a Star of David  

carved on the coffin lid. 

For years my father railed against  

synagogues, Zionism, all kinds  

of God talk – evangelical  

in his atheism.  

But in the end, when I asked  

one last time if I could bury him  

when he died, he shrugged and said 

if it means so much to you.  

It did.  It does. As his last gift,  

he let me bury him a Jew.  

Now the Star of David rests  

above his chest as thirsty roots 

of the jack pine mingle  

with heartache and nettle. 

Jane Schulman is a poet and fiction writer. She works as a speech pathologist with children with autism and cognitive delays.  Jane published her first book of poetry, Where Blue Is Blue, with Main Street Rag in October, 2020.  Her writing has appeared widely online and in print. She was a finalist for the Morton Marr Prize at Southwest Review.     

2 Comments

Filed under American Jewry, Family history, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , ,

January 17, 2022 · 7:30 am

Elegy for a Man I Hardly Knew

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

I had met him just once

a week before his sudden death.

I hardly knew him at all,

an afternoon’s conversation, 

no more.

We had spoken for hours,

and I felt there was a connection,

saw him as a possible new friend.

(You know now difficult it is for older

men like me to make new friends.)

So, even though I barely knew him,

his sudden death shocked me, and

I felt compelled to attend his funeral

where I heard the usual — the 23rd Psalm, 

“turn, turn, turn,” and a few desultory speeches

—ending with the Mourner’s Kaddish.

His life was described in twenty minutes.

Surely, a human being rates more time.

Surely, there is more to be said about a life.

Was his soul in a hurry to get to heaven?

Did the rabbi want to prevent excessive 

crying over the casket?

If the soul hovers at the grave site, as rabbis 

say, waiting to hear words of praise, words of 

sorrow, before making its journey to higher realms,

then perhaps I could see the need for such urgency.

But maybe I was being momentarily insensitive

taking notes in effect for my own demise, not

understanding why the funeral was so truncated,

or why my friend’s soul wasn’t allowed a final communion

with all the mourners at the place of his eternal rest.

Shouldn’t all souls be granted this indulgence?

Mel Glenn, the author of twelve books for young adults, is working on a poetry book about the pandemic tentatively titled Pandemic, Poetry, and People. He has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. You can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, Brooklyn Jews, Jewish, Jewish identity, Jewish writing, Judaism, poetry

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

June 9, 2014 · 6:40 am

More Funerals Than Weddings

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

Not a close friend by any means,
he bravely fought cancer, and lost.
No other friend went to his services,
but lest you think me heroic,
know I was, perhaps, just ghoulishly curious
as to Final Words solemnly spoken.
What would be the column addition
totaled up by the well-meaning rabbi?
When the eulogies are read,
would they provide a clue to my own?
Am I just playing Mark Twain
attending my own funeral,
or am I making serious preparation
to understand the finality of things?
Does the last ledger indicate a zero balance,
marked in neither red or black?
You go out as you came in – with nothing;
a shroud has no pockets, you know.
So, why am I not making more of my time
at the fair before the big tent is taken down forever?

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

Leave a comment

Filed under American Jewry, poetry

Tagged as ,