Kindness and Truth

“If you were a member of Melbourne’s Jewish community from the mid-1980s to 2015 you would—for better or worse—have had something to do with Ephraim Finch.” So begins Katia Ariel’s Ferryman: The Life and Deathwork of Ephraim Finch, a deeply moving biography of the extraordinary director of Melbourne’s chevra kadisha (Jewish burial society).

Over three decades, Finch conducted the funeral rites, what the Jewish tradition labels chesed shel emet (true kindness), for some ten thousand individuals, ritually washing their bodies, clothing them in burial shrouds whose knots he carefully tied, and placing them in their coffins. He had been an unusual choice for the job. When Finch was hired, he was a full-time construction worker “with a broad Aussie accent” who had converted to Judaism as an adult a decade earlier. Upon assuming the post of director of the chevra kadisha, he immediately made two key changes in the burial society’s operation. One was ritual: Mikvah (ritual immersion) would now be performed for everyone, not just for the very religious. The other was bureaucratic: In addition to the Australian government’s mandatory but minimal Family History Data Form, he added a supplementary form that would ensure that the chevra would take as much care for the departed’s biography as they did for their body. By gathering details of birth, immigration, and occupation, the new form cast Finch in the role of archivist and steward of family legacies, giving him a framework through which to meet grieving families. Ariel writes:

He invited families to bring in birth certificates, family trees, ketubot (religious marriage contracts, written in Aramaic), conversion certificates. “I’d be writing as much as I could,” he once told me, speaking with the urgency of a paramedic or firefighter.

For Holocaust survivors and their descendants—and Melbourne had the largest number of survivors per capita in the world outside of Israel—the form became life-changing. Finch would meet with the mourners, unfurl a large map of Europe, and allow them to reflect. As they reminisced, he collected the names of places of internment, escape routes, and tattoo numbers. Then, at home and off the clock, he would use these pieces to complete histories of the dead.

Finch’’s bureaucratic intervention created a space where survivors could share stories they had never before voiced. One of the most devastating moments of the book occurs when Finch is completing his supplemental form with a recent widower and his two middle-aged children. He asks the man where his wife was born, when she had immigrated to Australia, and whether she had been previously married. The sons bristle at the suggestion, but, in the silence that follows, the father shares with them for the first time that, while she had not, he had indeed been married before the war. Finch writes down his first wife’s name and village and then asks the question: Had there been a child? There had—a little girl who had perished. The brothers had never known that she existed. In this act of recordkeeping, Finch had given them a sister.

Such revelations become even more poignant when contrasted with Finch’s own family story of memories silenced and repressed. Shortly before his conversion to Judaism, his father revealed that his own mother, Nana Behrmann, who had moved from Germany to Australia after the war, was Jewish. When Ephraim approached his grandmother to ask if this was true, she responded evasively. He asked her for the names of her family, but she cut the conversation short, saying: “They lived happily ever after.”

Finch was remarkable in his ability to minister to and garner respect from people from every corner of Jewish life—from Melbourne’s ultra-Orthodox Adass Israel community to the avowedly secular. It was not merely his likability, but, as one grieving family put it, “He could read us.” Ariel focuses on what it means to “read” grief. Quoting the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave, of whom Finch is a great fan, Ariel writes: “There is a great deficit of language around grief. . . . So many grieving people just remain silent . . . with their only form of company being the dead themselves.” Finch was able to develop that vocabulary and communicate it both orally and through ritual. While describing his ritual choices in burying stillborn children, Finch explains how mindful he was of addressing the father’s, in addition to the mother’s, experience:

I got the husband to carry the coffin to the grave. Then, I’d say to him, “Give me your baby,” so I could place it in the ground. I use loshen like that to get him to understand that he’s losing. He is losing like she lost.” . . .

“Her body knows that,” he says of the bereaved mother. “So she doesn’t need words.”

“That’s right,” I [Ariel] respond, feeling my own maternal heart grow heavy.

“So she’s carrying, then he’s got to give over. It’s important,” he says, raw with anguish.

Finch’s relationship with those he served often lasted long after the burial. He maintained a relationship with the family of a Jewish soldier serving in the Australian Army who was killed by the Taliban. Sensing their need for narrative, he gave them books­—As a Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg, The Five Stages of Grief by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian L. Weiss. And, over the months following their son’s death, he “drip-fed the family movies, including Ghost.”

Finch was always preoccupied with those whom he thought might feel marginalized by an Orthodox chevra kadisha. In the 1980s, he ensured that a lesbian couple received a joint tombstone. When he faced objections, he responded, “It was her partner! What do you expect?”—a quiet act of inclusion at the margins of the Orthodox norms of that decade. He accommodated the wishes of secular Jews, providing them with the tahara (ritual cleansing required in Jewish law) that they sought without foisting on them an unwanted religious funeral ceremony. Ariel, a self-described Jewish secular humanist and cherry picker of customs and traditions, addresses why even those who have shunned ritual in life sometimes seek them at times of death. In the chaos that surrounds an immediate loss, ritual can fill the void and give the bereaved something concrete to hold onto after being cast adrift.

What drew Ephraim Finch to his vocation? His path to Judaism began with his wife’s chance discovery of Herman Wouk’s This Is My God in a used bookstore. Wouk’s description of Judaism’s wedding of doctrine and practice—that is, its embodiment of monotheism in everyday rituals and holidays—resonated with them. For Finch, a man with a driving spiritual calling, Wouk’s understanding of the vocation of the chosen people was also transformative. He saw Jewish history as “a melancholy account of our failure to live up to this high election, and the catastrophes that came from our failure. But the election stands, the mission remains.”

After his conversion, Finch found a place for himself within Jewish history, discovering kindred spirits among the Hasidim through Martin Buber’s retellings of Hasidic stories, and Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire, and the works of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. The manual labor of the chevra kadisha was a natural fit for Finch, who liked to work with his hands, washing the body and tying the shrouds. It was also physically demanding: “Even with two able-bodied workers, even with an average-sized adult, it is cumbersome, especially the sliding of a sheet beneath the body and the transfer onto a gurney.” It is precisely this physically taxing nature that Finch, a former construction worker, found especially meaningful because it provided a balance to the bookishness of Orthodox Jewish practice.

However, for Finch, the urgency of the work of the chevra was not only, or even mostly, physical. He devoted himself to this work because of an intellectual and spiritual abhorrence of forgetting:

What he cannot bear is disappearance, the notion that once upon a time there was something—a complex, thinking, sensing being . . . and then there is nothing. His worst nightmare is not the return of a ghost, or even the finality of death itself; it is of a void, of voices muted.

This is one of the reasons that the Holocaust became so central for him. The indignity of so many Jews being stripped of their identities was a unique horror for a man devoted to preserving the uniqueness of each person whom he buried. “I’m sort of there every day,” he says. “Who’s born in Częsctochowa, who’s born in Chęciny, who’s born in Katowice . . . I’m like blotting paper, I have Poland sucked into me.”

Not only Poland. In 2002, Finch was summoned for a task that demanded expertise in both funeral ritual and archival research. A nineteenth-century Tasmanian Jewish cemetery was being relocated to make room for a housing project. It had already endured decades of disturbances from past construction projects. Gravestones had been repurposed to plug vegetable garden walls, and just before Finch arrived, excavators had begun to raze the area. Together with a determined archaeologist, Parry Kostoglou, he pored through synagogue, state, and local records to determine who had been buried in the cemetery and began the work of excavation.

Fifty-one bodies were found, ranging from infants to elders. Some had come to Tasmania as convicts in chains. Among these was Isaac “Ikey” Solomon, whom most think was the inspiration for Charles Dickens’s character Fagin. Others included “Frances Nathan, 35 y & Infant, d. 1844,” who shared a single stone, and “Henrietta Rachel Moses, aged thirteen years and eight months, ‘departed to Eternal Happiness’ on the eve of Shabbat in December 1853.” Kostoglou’s archaeological report on the cemetery credits Finch both for his research and for driving the quest to “give the deceased back their identities.”

The Ferryman is an exploration of how an individual opens himself up to being spiritually shaped by a charismatic tradition and community, while also bringing his unique talents to bear in contributing to his adoptive people, thereby stamping his own spiritual mark on the lives of thousands.

Ariel describes the soul-crushing tragedies that Finch helped families through and “how much of his sadness over people lost, histories truncated, informs his colossal energy for this work of preservation.” A few months after Ferryman was published, two gunmen opened fire at a Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony on Bondi Beach in Sydney, killing fifteen people, among them a ten-year-old girl. One wonders with the author, “How do we care for wounds that can never be healed?” Finch offered mourners the comfort of seeing the “equal gravity of both life and death” without explanations as to why such horrific events occur. He gave families the promise of a Judaism that preserves the memories of those who have departed and is firmly committed to those who remain.