New York Hebrew Free Burial Association (HFBA), and Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island
TIME has a long story about New York Hart Island, its "potter field" that got many Covid-19 victims. Over a century and a half, more than a million people have been buried in unmarked graves on the island, including from past epidemics like tuberculosis, the 1918 flu and AIDS.
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This summer, TIME was granted unprecedented access to Hart Island to observe burial and exhumation operations and, on June 26, witnessed the retrieval and formal reburial of casket 40-3 and its occupant, Ellen F. Torron. This is her story. Her body was found in her Queens apartment. The 74 year old was a hoarder and the police had to make a narrow path to find her. The medical examiner couldn’t tell whether or not she had contracted COVID-19, but she died just as the disease was beginning to ravage New York City. In March and April, the death count mounted to more than 27,000, or six times the normal level, and the city’s death care system was overwhelmed. The influx of corpses forced municipal morgues to free up space. With room running out, Torron’s body was placed inside a pine box and prepared for passage to Hart Island.
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City investigators hadn’t been able to thoroughly search Torron’s apartment back in April, but they did happen to discover a birth certificate that showed she was born at the Jewish Maternity Hospital in Manhattan. The Queens County public administrator’s office knew that was enough proof for Hebrew Free Burial Association (HFBA), a 132-year-old nonprofit that offers low-cost and free burial for indigent Jews.
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As the Grand Caravan pulls under the arches of HFBA’s Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island, Donofrio is greeted by Rabbi Shmuel Plafker, 70, an Orthodox chaplain, who directs him to a squat one-story building nearby. Inside, Donofrio, Plafker and a group of men don head-to-toe protective gear, and Donofrio uses a power drill to remove the 12 screws holding the lids onto each of the two coffins. When the second lid is removed, Donofrio leaves the men to the ritual.
None of the men left behind in the sterile, windowless room had met Torron in life, none knew her religious convictions, and none have mortuary training. They voluntarily undertake the ceremony pursuant to Jewish law. Torron’s corpse is stripped of clothes and dressed in eight separate pieces of white linen clothing, including a bonnet, shirt, pants, gown and belt. She’s then placed back inside both coffins and secured with the screws and carried out the building feet-first. The men lift the coffin into the back of a flatbed truck and make the short walk to Torron’s new burial plot, in Section 91 of the cemetery. The small group passes mounds of dirt piled atop freshly dug graves. They pass hundreds of tombstones, including 22 victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Holocaust survivors and Soviet Union refugees who sought asylum in the U.S.
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Torron was born in Manhattan on Jan. 19, 1946, the only child of Polish and Lithuanian immigrants. She had lived on her own since she was 18 years old, and in her 40s, she put herself through school, attending Hunter College and graduating in 1988 with a double major in English and classical studies. Fairman says Torron was the sort of woman who should’ve been born in another era because she’d likely have been a lawyer herself. “She was a victim of the times, honey,” she says.
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By law, the Queens County public administrator’s office must attempt to track down next of kin to distribute the estate. The only family that the public administrator has identified thus far are several first cousins once removed, the furthest relatives eligible to lay claim to an estate. One of those cousins is Meryle Mishkin-Tank, a 56-year-old paralegal who lives in the San Francisco area. Not only has Mishkin-Tank never met Torron—she didn’t even know she existed. Now most days after work and on weekends, she’s trying to uncover details about Torron’s life and death. She’s learned of—and contacted—five new cousins and an aunt through genealogy research. “It doesn’t sound like any of the cousins knew anything about Ellen,” she says. “It’s just sad.”
https://time.com/5913151/hart-island-covid/
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