Staten Island, NY – Jewish Cemetery Where All Are Equals in Death

Staten Island, NY – Two shovels were planted in the mound next to the open mouth of the grave. “For those of you who don’t know about this,” said the rabbi, Shmuel Plafker, “let me show you.”

He lifted the first pile of dirt with the back of the shovel. “To symbolize that we really don’t want to do this,” Rabbi Plafker said.

It was a perfect early spring day: acres of blue sky, the lightest of breezes moving past the graves of Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island. Here, 55,000 Jews are buried in plots owned by the Hebrew Free Burial Association.

These are the graves of the poor, which, under Judaic law, do not differ from those of the rich. The ritual of burial is a rope across time: families who lived a century ago at 108 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side – now known as the Tenement Museum – are buried at Mount Richmond. The maternal grandparents of Mel Brooks are down one row. In another corner are 23 of the girls and boys who were killed in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in 1911.

On Tuesday afternoon, in Section 35, it was the time to lay Jeffrey Lynn Schneider to rest, in a box of raw pine, the lid barely held on with three wooden pegs.

As the rabbi worked, a man named Stanley Weinstein, a cousin of Mr. Schneider’s, picked up another shovel and pushed earth into the hole. A spray of cousins and friends stood around the grave, a dozen or so, waiting their turn. After a minute of work, Mr. Weinstein drove the shovel back into the mound. “We don’t hand it off to the next person, to show that we don’t want to pass on death,” Rabbi Plafker said.

It was the rabbi’s third funeral of the day. At the first two, for elderly people, he and three men who work in the cemetery were the only people at the graveside. The rabbi said the prayers; the men performed the ritual with the shovels.

“We are the only friends all the time for poor people,” said Joe Shalem, the superintendent of the cemetery, nodding to the two gravediggers, Cesar Bustamante and Wilson Montes Deoca. The free burial society began in 1888, after the first waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe. The society bought the 23 acres on Staten Island and began burials at Mount Richmond in March 1909. The aim is to provide traditional Jewish burials to people who cannot afford them, said Amy Koplow, the society’s executive director.

The thumps hitting the pine box became more muffled as the mourners piled dirt upon dirt. The first person of Creation, Rabbi Plafker said, was Adam, whose name comes from the Hebrew word “adamah,” meaning the ground. Thus, he said, the body is returned to the earth as it came, washed and wrapped in a shroud with no pockets.

Mr. Schneider was 54. He grew up on East 17th Street in Midwood, Brooklyn, a bright boy who went to a yeshiva and then Stuyvesant High School, mastering chess and backgammon. “He would prefer to read than go out to a restaurant,” said Carol Metrick, a cousin who as a child lived in the same house as Mr. Schneider. He went to the University of Arizona but gave it up after a freak snowstorm.

For a while, he worked on the crews of television shows. He ran a car service. He owned homes in Rockland County, but sold them under financial pressure. He had girlfriends but never married, Ms. Metrick said, and seemed easygoing at family gatherings. Physical ailments led to a hermetic existence, the family said.

“He had disk problems of some sort, which isolated him from a lot of things,” Mr. Weinstein said. “I’d call him on the holidays, I’d offer to take him out to dinner. He said he couldn’t because his back hurt.”

His parents died nine years ago. He moved back to Midwood around 2004, with no apparent source of income. By February, he faced a Housing Court judgment of $24,000, Mr. Weinstein said, and told a friend he was going upstate.

Instead, he drove back to 17th Street, parked across the street from his boyhood home, got in the back seat under a blanket, and shot himself in the head. His sister tried to track him down and Mr. Weinstein filed a missing person’s report. Six weeks of parking tickets were stuck on the windshield when his body was found last Thursday.

The rabbi recited a prayer. The family members, clasping each other, walked to the cars. Mr. Shalem and his gravediggers filled the hole, then raked the ground to smooth it.