This week I was introduced to a crowd of new people. Charlotte, for example, a keen skier who helped children learn to read. Daniel, gentle, sensitive and proudly gay, who supported others as he struggled with his own difficulties. Babs, who used to type letters for the then Chief Rabbi — and had to use much tippex, because she wrote “Chief Rabbit” so often.
Alas, I will never get to meet these wonderful-sounding people, even after lockdown ends. They all died before this awful time and I read about them on www.hesped.org, a website set up to allow Jewish families to share the eulogies written for funerals and shivas. It was launched last September, and has grown quietly since, largely through word of mouth. Its creator, Miriam Grabiner, had no idea of course, that a global pandemic would take thousands of lives seven months later. But with funerals now taking place online, and shiva suspended, it feels absolutely right that there is a place to share tributes that everyone can read.
Her idea had been brewing for a long time and took six months to design and set up. “It was a very delicate issue, how to approach people,” she says. She asked friends to contribute and then was asked by the Association of Jewish Refugees to write an article. She also publicised the idea at Limmud. “We’re asking people to share very personal material,” she points out. Now she has decided to advertise in the JC. Her hope is that the website will offer some comfort to families during the COVID-19 crisis. “When people are sitting shiva alone at home, having to self isolate, it is just awful.” She invites people to get in touch.
A hesped is a very special sort of tribute, she says, not a CV or an obituary. “Each one is unique and interesting,” she says of the tributes already posted. “I think there is this alchemy that takes place. You might start to prepare your thoughts when someone is living and breathing. But you only start to write when they are gone. And it just flows out.”
“You may not say everything you want to — and there is the stone-setting to fill in any gaps — but somehow, in writing or just speaking, you find the words.”
A hesped is there to “work out what is important” about a person’s life, and that may not necessarily be their working life. “You’re asking who is that person, and how do you sum up all they were.”
There is no charge for using the website and no hidden agenda or ulterior purpose. As it grows, Grabiner also hopes it will prove important to the wider British community as well as to Jewish families, as it provides a unique, personal record of individual Jewish lives, a slice of history and an antidote to “so much horrible antisemitic stuff.”
By reading a record of ordinary and extraordinary lives, everyone can see that “there are as many different ways of being Jewish, as there are of being people.”
