When it comes to arranging the transfer of niftarim from all over the world for burial in Eretz Yisrael, Motty is known as a veritable magician, although he qualifies that there’s no schtick involved. He says everything is legal and aboveboard, but great connections, quick thinking, and knowledge of flight schedules reap the benefits. Today, as we’re speaking, he’s busy with a Yid who passed away in Vilna. He has a driver bringing the coffin from Vilna to Vienna, and he is sending it to Tel Aviv on tomorrow’s El Al flight. The entire process will take two days, while the Israeli consul’s original estimate was from four days to three weeks.

During Covid, in a world of restricted travel and too many devastating losses, Motty’s niche was in high demand. While the medical services and undertakers were hesitant, often terrified, to handle Covid deaths, Motty did not shrink back, and this willingness helped him develop good relationships with them. The first time he had to bring someone from Antwerp to Eretz Yisrael during Covid, no airlines were flying, and so he hired a private jet. After that, the situation became more unstable, with new waves of pandemic and regulations in constant flux. He had bookings from Strasbourg, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and all over Europe for burial in Eretz Yisrael, each time requiring special permits and flight schedule gymnastics.

Although before Covid he used to have to travel himself to fill in the paperwork in person, Motty is now able to make arrangements by phone. He gets called by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, too. Not long ago, an undertaker in a village in rural Germany charged a family 7000 Euros to get a body to Israel. The Foreign Ministry called Motty to make him an offer.

When a Jewish lady passed away in Perth, Australia, the local funeral company had no idea how to get her to her burial plot in Eretz Yisrael. The average time offered by travel agencies for a coffin to go from Australia to Israel is eleven days, including a twelve-hour layover in Hong Kong.  Her family in Eretz Yisrael called ZAKA, who called Motty Hammer. He checked that the paperwork was ready, and realized that the issue was simply the flights. He reserved Perth to Doha, Doha to Germany, Germany to Tel Aviv. They had the kevurah four days later.

Cremation is tragically often the choice of assimilated Jews. When Motty is informed that a Jew is scheduled for cremation, he does his best to intervene. In one instance, he contacted a Jewish woman’s lawyer, who explained his client’s motive for cremation: Many years ago, this woman had lost a daughter in another country. Although she was buried in a Jewish cemetery, she had no money to pay for a gravestone, and later, seeing her grave with no marker, completely overgrown with high grass, was devastating for the mother. Upon hearing this, Motty took responsibility for erecting a respectable gravestone within thirty days of the funeral, and the lawyer allowed him to proceed with a traditional Jewish funeral and burial. Twenty-five days later, the gravestone was up.

On rare occasions, Motty has also been involved with moving kevarim. Moving a kever is never a decision to be taken lightly, as it involves serious halachic considerations. Where halachah permits it, most countries require specific permits and procedures for exhumations. Then there’s the difficulty of the actual job, and the health and safety risks.

Every chevra kaddisha comes across complications from time to time. For Motty, though, nothing is impossible, and just like the brave Jews who secured the Chasam Sofer’s kever during the height of Nazi savagery, he knows that everything that has to be done can be done right.

HE SHARES SOME OF THOSE STORIES OF BRINGING JEWS THEIR FINAL KAVOD.

A Burial and a Bris

Asecular Jewish Russian couple living in Bratislava had twins, a boy and a girl. When the baby girl was niftar at a day old, the hospital staff told them, “You’re Jewish — usually this Hammer guy comes and walks Jewish people through the burial and grieving process. Should we call him?”

I’m not even sure how the staff knew they were Jewish, but they called me and I came to the hospital and arranged the baby’s burial. The parents were understandably overwhelmed and grief-stricken, but at one point I said to them, “Listen, you’re not going home empty-handed. You have a beautiful baby boy, and you’ll even have a bris, you’ll make a nice party….”

“What’s a bris?” they wanted to know.

I explained about the mitzvah for Jewish males to be circumcised, about keeping tradition, celebrating, and giving a Jewish name, but they weren’t too sure they wanted to do it. Eventually, they agreed, but the mother stipulated she wanted a doctor to perform the milah, not a mohel. I recommended a doctor who is also a mohel, which they were happy with. When they contacted him, though, this doctor reassured the mother that she had nothing to worry about when using the local mohel, Hershy Gutman from Vienna — he had plenty of experience and did it all safely.

We discussed doing the bris on the eighth day, but the father objected, saying that he needed time to arrange for his relatives to come in from Russia. They ended up choosing a date about three weeks later. When I came to the bris, an elderly Russian Jew was there, the grandfather of the baby’s father. He’d brought along with him a special piece of cloth, which he said was a tradition to lay on the kisei shel Eliyahu and on the sandek’s lap. So much for Jews who didn’t even know what a bris was — the roots were still there….

“No Thanks, We’d Rather Cremate”

A Chabad rabbi living in Epping Forest, England, had forged a connection with a Jewish fellow who was married to a non-Jew. When his mother passed away in a city in Germany, his daughters, who were not Jewish, called the local Jewish community to arrange her burial. The German community was happy to arrange it, but since the woman had not been a member and not paid fees to the burial society over the years, the charge was 15,000 Euros. The chevra kaddisha was totally inflexible about the cost, because if it started to make exceptions, others would also not pay the fees and just expect free burial. This family had no money, though, and if they had, they probably wouldn’t have wanted to spend 15,000 on a Jewish funeral.

The Chabad shaliach  heard from the son what was going on and contacted me. He had a friend in Monsey who would help arrange funds, but he needed me to take care of the practicalities. I called the granddaughters and offered to help them, explaining that the money could be raised, but they refused. “No, we’re just going to cremate,” they said.

From my knowledge, the average cost of a cremation is about 1200 Euro. So I said, “How about you just raise 1,200 Euro in four payments, and I’ll raise the rest?”

“No,” they said, “we don’t want to. Since the Jewish community here doesn’t care about what happens to my grandmother, we don’t want to bury her in their cemetery anyway. We’re going to cremate.”

“I’m in charge of burials in Vienna, so I can arrange a Jewish burial for your grandmother in Vienna, if you’d prefer it, and help with the fundraising for that,” I offered.

“No, we don’t want that, thanks. We’re going ahead with a cremation.”

I pulled my trump card. “What about if your grandmother could be buried in Israel, an especially holy place for all Jewish people?”

They thought about it. Israel? Yes, Israel would be nice for their Jewish grandmother, they said.

I bought a plot in Haifa. Thanks to the generosity of Chesed Shel Emes donors in New York, this poor Jewish lady was transferred to Eretz Yisrael and buried with a minyan present, and I made sure there was even a live video hookup for her son and granddaughters.

When I checked my personal bank account a few weeks later, I found a payment there. Tracing it brought me back to one of the kindest hearts in New York — not only had he funded this transfer, he’d even paid me for my time and work.

The Kaddish Jew

There are still Jews who were born before World War II, who have lived most of their lives under the Communists and have all but given up their identity. Yet when it comes to burial, many of them go back to their deepest roots and choose to go the Jewish route. In addition to running the chevra kaddisha in Vienna, I take care of Jewish funerals in Bratislava and the rest of Slovakia. I still do about 15 burials a year in the Bratislava area. Most of these people did not even marry Jews.

One non-Jewish woman called the rabbi here, saying that her husband, who had just died, had wanted to be interred in the Jewish cemetery. The rabbi wasn’t sure if the man was Jewish, but my attitude was, “Why would someone cheat to get a Jewish funeral?” So we arranged the funeral right here. On the day, as we stood together in the taharah room, someone arrived and said that he was the niftar’s uncle. He too was someone who has not been affiliated with the community in any way, had never come to shul to hear shofar, no Kol Nidrei, nothing. Yet, he wasn’t at all bad at saying Kaddish….”

Into the Covenant

While working at Vienna’s Jewish cemetery, I’ve gotten to know the regulars. Among them was an older Russian Jew named Chezkele, who would come to visit relatives’ graves. He spoke only Yiddish and Russian, no German, and he often brought others with him. From time to time, I would ask these Russians to help out by making up a minyan at a funeral. Then I started to call them whenever we needed a minyan for a meis mitzvah or unaffiliated person. I pay them a little and they’re happy to come.

One day at six a.m. the Russian fellow called me, distraught. “Mottela. Mendel is geshtorben [Mendel died].” The man had lost his son.

I went there to the hospital to be with him, but when I came, he disappeared. I figured that the pain was too much for him and he’d run away from it. But when I reached the beis olam he was standing there blocking my way. “Mottele,” he said to me. “I lived in Russland. There was no mohel there to do a bris on my son. Please, mach eim a bris before you bury him.”

Of course, I arranged a mohel for his son’s milah. After that, I’d go over to Chezkele’s house sometimes and we’d sing Yiddish songs together. Recently, he passed on too.

“Me? I’m a Nazi”

MYphone rang as I walked out of shul on Purim night of 2016. It was a locally-accented Austrian man named Hans. “I’m not Jewish, I’m actually a Nazi, but my aunt was Jewish, and she just died. I found your number listed online. You take care of Jewish burials, so you take care of it. Do it whenever it’s convenient for you.”

“We do our funerals as soon as possible, according to Jewish tradition,” I said. “We’ll do it right away in the morning.”

My usual golden hour for meis mitzvah funerals is 11 a.m., which gives the gravediggers time to get there, but as it was Purim, I decided to hold the levayah at 10 a.m., so I could get back in time to hear the Megillah after the burial was over. It all ran smoothly, nothing remarkable, and I put Hans out of my mind.

Until three weeks later, when the same number appeared on my screen on a Motzaei Shabbos. I picked up.

“Hammer? Come to my house. I need to speak to you.”

Alarm bells went off in my mind. This man had told me clearly that he was a Nazi. Was I going to his house alone at night? “Let’s speak tomorrow over coffee,” I offered.

“I was nice when you buried my Jewish aunt, wasn’t I? I agreed to your rules. Now you come round to my house.”

I went. Hans looked horrible when he opened the door. He walked me inside and to the bedroom, and… his wife was dead.

“I am so sorry. I don’t do non-Jewish burials,” I told him.

“You fool! How do you think I had a Jewish aunt? That was my wife’s mother’s sister.”

I was shocked. Obviously, we needed something to prove this, so he brought out a file of documents and showed me his wife’s paperwork. As he was flipping through, I saw his father’s documents too. They were the real thing, Nazi identification papers, membership in the SS. It was stuff you see in museum exhibits about World War II.

“Can I see those papers?” I asked him. With a disgusted fascination, I read the German documents about his father’s career in the SS. Then I came to one paper which recorded that his father was ordered to relocate to a different district, a lower-class residential area, because his wife was Jewish.

I found Hans’ mother’s birth certificate, and it was issued under the auspices of the Jewish community — from 1878 to 1939, births had to be registered either by the church or by the Jewish community.

It seems that although she had “given up her Judaism by conversion” in 1927, the Nazis still classified her as Jewish.

I looked up at this suffering man, whose deceased wife lay before him.  “In this case, if your mother was Jewish, you are Jewish too. I can sell you a plot in the cemetery right next to your wife.”

He stared at me for a moment. Then he raised his voice and yelled to the three blond teenagers sitting in the kitchen. “Jungs! [Boys!] We are all Jewish. The difference is that I only had a Jewish mother, and you boys have a Jewish father and mother!”

I organized the wife’s funeral, and he bought the plot next to her. I’ve seen him once or twice since then, as he occasionally visits the grave. His family is a sad picture of the tragedy of assimilation across three generations.

Home for Good

Sheya Perlmutter was a wealthy Viennese Yid during the 1920s. He owned real estate in a few places, including Victoria, Australia, which he travelled to during his lifetime, and his legacy is alive in a trust fund which many Torah mosdos benefit from until today. Although he was niftar childless and was buried in 1931 in Vienna, his wife moved to Eretz Yisrael, where she lived until her passing in 1938, and she was buried there. The trust fund they left, an incredible legacy of charity which keeps their memories alive until today, is registered and administrated in Israel.

One day, out of the blue, a lawyer called me from Bnei Brak. He was an administrator who had found documents making up the foundation of the trust fund, stating that it was Sheya Perlmutter’s wish to be buried in Eretz Yisrael. Since that will was legally intertwined with the fund, he put a freeze on the fund until the deceased was moved to his rightful place.

I looked into it, and strangely, while Perlmutter’s burial was recorded in Vienna’s beis olam, he had no matzeivah. It appeared that his kever in Vienna was never supposed to be a final resting place. He had wanted to be taken to Eretz Yisrael. Why exactly he wasn’t, I don’t know. It could be that legalities or logistics got in the way of the plan.

It was time for action, but it wasn’t easy. I needed special permits from the Austrian government to exhume him and move the remains to Eretz Yisrael. The lack of a matzeivah made it even more complicated — we had to rely on the cemetery records and count the rows in order to be absolutely certain we were opening the right grave. It helped that we knew he was a tall man.

When not long afterward, a cheder contacted me and asked me to send them a picture of Sheya Perlmutter’s matzeivah in the Vienna cemetery, since they were learning l’ilui nishmaso and benefitting from his largesse, I was able to send them on. He finally has a matzeivah, and it’s not in Vienna. It’s in the Holy Land.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1032)