'Human dignity': 30 strangers attend Rockland funeral

About 30 people attended Francine Stein’s funeral Wednesday, none of whom she had ever met.

Her pallbearers were strangers — men and women who carried her simple casket and then lowered it, shoveling warm earth into the grave.

If those strangers had not attended Stein's funeral, nobody would have.

“For the people who attended, it was an assertion of human dignity,” Rabbi Elchanan Weinbach said.

Weinbach, who officiated the graveside service, said he was sad to learn Tuesday that nobody would be attending Stein’s funeral. Hellman Memorial Chapels had called on Weinbach's services; the rabbi at congregation Shaaray Israel in Montebello is on a short list of people the funeral home calls when there’s no clergy designated to handle someone's affairs.

Weinbach was told that only he and the funeral director would be attending Stein’s service.

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“The funeral director said, ‘This is the easiest funeral you’re ever going to do,’” Weinbach said. But, “The idea of a woman dying alone, as I thought about it, it went from being the easiest funeral to a very difficult one. It just seemed so sad.

“I was pretty overwhelmed, actually,” he said.

Weinbach told his daughter, Ora Weinbach, about it. Like her father, she was unhappy to learn that “literally nobody” would be at Stein’s funeral.

“That really bothered me and I felt, like, 'how could that happen?'” she said. “I just felt if anybody could be present that would be a beautiful thing for this woman.”

So she posted something on Facebook asking if anyone was available to attend the service.

For Mindy Liebman of Monsey, who responded, it was a question of “human decency."

“To me it’s mind-blowing that a person can live an entire life and die and have nobody there who cares that they died,” she said. “It’s important to celebrate her life, to celebrate the fact that she even lived."

People shared her Facebook post again and again, and again. Ultimately, as many as 30 strangers were present Wednesday to pay their respects to Stein.

“The eulogy was nonexistent because the only facts that we knew was her date of birth and death,” Elchanan Weinbach said.

Stein died at the age of 83. Elchanan Weinbach said he learned at the cemetery that Stein had been a musician and a teacher at the Juilliard  School.

Gwendolyn Curry, an employee at the New Monsey Park Home for Adults, where Stein lived before being transferred to a nursing home, began to cry when she heard Thursday that Stein's funeral had been attended only by strangers.

"I would have gone," Curry said through tears. "A whole lot of people here would have gone. Everyone loved her. She had a beautiful personality. She was a beautiful person in and out."

Why people attended the funeral varied.

For some, it was to help fulfill a Jewish religious requirement. A lack of attendees “means you’re not going to have a ‘minyan,’ a quorum of 10 men, to recite certain prayers,” explained Aaron Eckstein, a friend of Ora Weinbach.

Amitay Stern of Monsey also saw Ora Weinbach’s plea.

“I never heard of her, never met her in my life,” he said. “I happened to come across her post. It just tugged at us. We started thinking, what can we do?”

He shared it with one of his clients, Marquis Home Care. Bassie Friedman, director of business development at the agency, was touched. Her company offered free van service to the cemetery and water for attendees.

“We had no idea who she was," she said, but, "It just didn’t sit right with me.”

For Ora Weinbach, the fact that “all the people who showed up took time out of their day” was powerful.

“I did nothing. I literally just wrote a Facebook post,” she said. “The people who came out in the middle of a random day, those are the people who did a lot. It was amazing.”

Though he is a rabbi, Elchanan Weinbach downplayed the religious aspects of the event. Though he said he believes “it matters, even to the deceased,” Weinbach said “there was a wide crowd in terms of Jewish observance and affiliation.”

“We had an atheist there, who was just there to do a good thing for the community,” he said.