Before making the call, I’d reviewed Jeremy’s file. I saw that he was registered for body donation to science, which could mean cremation.

Now I gently raised the subject.

“Was that really his choice? Or was it because of money?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. He said he didn’t want to be a burden on anyone, and that’s what he told the state guardian. I can’t change it.”

I went to visit Jeremy myself and also arranged for a frum chaplain, Rabbi Shlomo Friedman of Jewish Hospice of Michigan, to visit him regularly. By then, though, Jeremy was already losing clarity. It was difficult to have any real conversation with him about burial or after-death choices. We had to suffice with trying to make him as comfortable as possible. It was all we could do.

About a month or two later, I learned that Jeremy had passed away during the night and that a representative of Wayne State University had already arrived at 7 a.m. to take his body for donation.

When I read that email, my heart sank. I felt a sharp sense of regret. Maybe I could have done more, sooner. The body had already been taken. The state guardian had arranged everything. The odds of reversing things seemed almost impossible. I had lost the chance of bringing a Yid, my brother, to kevuras Yisrael.

But something inside me said, You have to try.

I called Jeremy’s sister to offer my condolences, and she thanked me for everything we had done.

Then I asked her, “If the entire burial were paid for, do you think your brother would have wanted a Jewish burial?”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I don’t know for sure. But one thing I do know is that six million Jews were burned in ovens. I can’t imagine willingly putting my brother into an oven through cremation.”

My heart skipped a beat. There was hope. “Okay,” I told her, “I will arrange all the burial expenses. What I need you to do is call the state guardian and say that based on your conversations with your brother, you know he would have wanted a Jewish burial if he had the funds, and now the funds are available.”

She agreed and called me back shortly afterward.

“The guardian said okay,” she told me. “But Wayne State already has the body.”

I gave her Wayne State’s phone number and asked her to call immediately. It was December 31, about 8:30 in the morning. She called and reached the very person who was responsible for picking up the body.

She told them she was the sister of the deceased and she wanted him to have a Jewish burial.

“No problem,” they responded. “We respect that.”

“You’re lucky you called today,” the person added. “Normally, donated bodies are used right away. But because of the upcoming holiday, the body was placed in a freezer.”

When Helen updated me, I immediately called Rabbi Yonah Pirutinsky of Chesed Shel Emes of Detroit and explained the situation. He reached out to Wayne State, who delivered the body. Shortly afterward, a taharah was performed, and within hours, I was standing in the cemetery together with Rabbi Pirutinsky and Rabbi Friedman. It was a lonely levayah, but I was thrilled that Yaakov ben Shmuel was being brought to kevuras Yisrael.

When I called his sister and told her in which cemetery her brother had been buried, she was quiet. Then her voice broke.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” she said slowly. “That cemetery where you just buried my brother… my grandfather is buried there, too.”

She told me about her grandfather, a frum Yid who had left Poland before the war, who came to this country with nothing and tried to build a life. It wasn’t easy. He struggled to make a living and his son eventually left the path of Torah. Now, decades later, we had just buried the grandson of that Polish Jew in the same cemetery where he lay.

It felt as if a circle had been gently closed. A neshamah that had drifted away had come home, not only to a Jewish grave, but to the roots from which he came.

For me, the most powerful part of this story was realizing that it all began with my one small decision to help another Jew, after which Hashem put every single piece into place.

Without arranging that haircut, I would never have had a connection with Jeremy’s sister. Everything had been prepared months earlier.

Later, I learned that Jeremy’s father had died when he was very young. When Jeremy reached bar mitzvah age, he put on tefillin for a time in his father’s memory.

And years later, he merited a full Jewish burial.

All because I was able to say yes once — and watch Hashem do the rest.

Shneur Steinberg lives in Lakewood, New Jersey, and operates Amara Hospice in the state of Michigan.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1100)