With English shuls closed once again for services, the United Synagogue has announced that people unable to say Kaddish can pair with volunteers in a country where religious buildings remain open.
The US will also be offering live-streamed davening online from a different community each week during the lockdown.
During the original lockdown, congregants were able to twin with a volunteer for Kaddish on a case-by-case basis and there were around six monthly pairings. But the US’s community development manager, Rabbi Shlomo Odze, told the JC that with people now able to register online, there had been 50 sign-ups in a week.
The original group of 40 volunteers for pairing — most from Israel — had grown to more than 100 across the globe.
“I think it’s important to recognise the sense of connection that saying Kaddish gives to the bereaved,” he said. “Kaddish, because of what it represents, is something that people really find great comfort in.”
One US member lost her 84-year-old grandfather to pneumonia in early February. The 30-year-old from Mill Hill, who asked not to be named, has had Kaddish said in her stead by volunteers in Israel and Manchester throughout the year. It had been a great comfort to her “and a weight off my mind”.
Peter Korn, 56, was unable to say Kaddish to mark the yahrzeit of his father, who died 16 years ago. The US has now sourced a volunteer in Brooklyn to say it on his behalf.
“It’s lovely,” the Hendon resident said. “I’m not a particularly sentimental person but religiously it’s significant and I’m very pleased to be able to honour my father.”
The first lockdown service broadcast from the US was streamed from Watford Synagogue. Its rabbi, Mordechai Chalk, said: “It’s really important that we continue this level of communal adhesion in any way that we can, whether it be on Zoom, Facebook or YouTube.”
As a minister serving a smaller community, had he been nervous broadcasting to a wider audience? “When I was younger, in high school, I was very nervous of any form of public speaking,” he recalled. But since becoming a rabbi, “it’s not something I shy away from”.
In a letter to congregants, US president Michael Goldstein wrote that having to shut synagogues once again had been “extremely painful, particularly given the extent to which our communities have followed the strict government guidelines so far. But the rising infection rate demands that we do so.”
