Every year now, before the service, I stop at the cemetery office to pay a courtesy call on their grounds manager, Tommy Whelan. We chat for 15 or 20 minutes and catch up on each other's year as well as dealing with any issues that can't be taken care of with a phone call. This year, he told me about how hard it was for him and his crew, as well as everyone working at the cemetery during the first months of the pandemic.
He said that normally that get a handful of funerals every day or during a week, but that every morning when the cemetery gates were opened there'd be a line of hearses waiting, sometimes more than 30 burials in a day, and that number was that low because the cemetery only accepts Jewish deceased. Nearby Pinelawn, a nonsectarian cemetery was getting 2 1/2 times as many. One morning, a panel truck was waiting and inside were stacked a half dozen or more coffins. The funeral director didn't have enough hearses. Coffins were arriving in all sorts of vehicles because people were dying in droves. It must've been horrible.
So as difficult as it was for me and the other members of the Radomer Society's cemetery committee, I think he had it worse.
Here is a few more photos. One more post will follow.
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