Jewish cemeteries are not typically places where ashes are interred, but in a rare ceremony on Sunday (May 25), a small rock consisting of pressed human ashes was placed in a wooden box and lowered into a deep grave as some 200 mourners looked on.
The ashes were handed to a North Carolina soldier who toured the crematorium at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany shortly after it was liberated by American troops in 1945.
Their journey from Dachau to Dobson (a small town north of Winston-Salem) to Durham is a remarkable story of a soldier’s witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust and his son’s commitment to finding them an honorable resting place.
Under sunny skies and in the presence of the mayor and representatives of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, two rabbis sang Psalm 23 in Hebrew and delivered a short eulogy for the unknown person or people whose ashes were buried.
“We do not know if they are the ashes of a scholar or a silversmith, a homemaker or a physician,” said Rabbi Jen Feldman of the Kehillah Synagogue in nearby Chapel Hill. “Their identity or identities, the stories of their life or their lives, are silent to us.”
Nevertheless, the ashes are reminders “of the infinite value of each human life,” added Rabbi Daniel Greyber of Beth El Synagogue in Durham.
Ashes Of Holocaust Victims Killed In Dachau Find Final Resting Place In Durham Hebrew Cemetery
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