Where is our baby's body?
This is Noach’s story, and it is ours as a family.
In 2019, on January 30th, at 35 weeks pregnant, something didn’t feel right. After an hour, the doctor confirmed that our son’s heart had stopped. Long hours of lonely and quiet labor followed. No nurses rushed to the delivery room when Noach was born, the doctor slowly put his gloves on, knowing there was nothing he could do to bring this baby back to life.
We held Noach for four hours, heart-broken, desperately looking at his perfect face and wishing for only one breath, for a sign of life. He looked as if he was sleeping. The nurses asked us after two hours to arrange for the burial. We were both beside ourselves, overwhelmed by pain and trying to process that we would have to separate from Noach way too soon.
A Chabad Rabbi that we were friendly with offered his help and suggested to use Levine and Sons Funeral Home in Philadelphia, who worked together with the National Association of Chevra Kadisha (NASCK). We had no family close by that could assist us and thus agreed to use Levine and Sons, which we had heard was a reputable funeral home.
And then everything started to become very complicated:
Noach’s dad handed his tiny body over to the staff of Levine and Sons at the hospital. The two men put Noach in a tiny, purple bag and he was taken away from us, forever. We were told that Noach would be buried in a section of the cemetery for stillborn babies. We were okay with that, not yet knowing what that meant. Levine and Sons didn’t give us a contract or any document that described the service that they would perform. We also didn’t know what to ask for because we never had to bury anyone before and were overwhelmed having to welcome our baby dead, and to let him go right after.
We were told that Levine and Sons would be sending us a bill a couple of weeks after the burial. They didn’t want to bother us with that at that moment, they said.
All that we received was a text message from Rabbi Katkovsky, a staff member of Levine and Sons, asking us for $150 weeks later. That’s when we started to be suspicious.
We managed to face the gravesite a couple of months after Noach was born. Levine and Sons had chosen to bury him at Mt. Sinai Cemetery in Lakewood, NJ. We didn’t understand why they took him to that cemetery, two hours outside of Philadelphia, out of all Jewish cemeteries in the Philadelphia area, and never received an explanation for that.
At the cemetery, we couldn’t find his grave and neither a section for stillborn babies. There was no small, freshly dug grave and the staff working at the cemetery had never heard of a section for stillborn babies or anything like that. We were in shock. Now, we had lost Noach again and we had no place to mourn the loss of our beloved child.
Back at home we called Levine and Sons, inquiring about the plot that Noach was given. Adam Levine told us that he didn’t know where Noach was buried and asked us to call Rabbi Parnes from the Lakewood Chevra Kadisha who actually carried out the burial. Again, we didn’t understand why the assigned funeral director from Levine and Sons had no information about the gravesite when they were the ones who were supposed to be present and overseeing the burial. A short phone call with Rabbi Parnes didn’t get us any further. Parnes simply refused to tell us where the gravesite was.
We called Adam Levine again, this time asking for the actual burial record. He didn’t have one, he told us. We demanded to know where our son was buried, but Levine only responded that if we had paid more money, we had more rights to know about the burial.
We were shocked, disgusted and horrified, to say the least. There was no apology, no explanation why nobody documented our son’s burial, and no attempt to help us in any way to find Noach’s remains.
Months of us investigating what had happened followed while trying to deal with the grief and the physical recovery.
With the help of an attorney, we arranged a meeting with Rabbi Parnes at the cemetery, who promised to give us the burial record and to show us the gravesite. At the meeting, he pointed to an area next to the parking lot that can only be described as a mass grave and said “somewhere over there”. One shock followed the next. A mass grave? Pictures of the Holocaust and Auschwitz popped up in our minds and there are no words for what we felt being directed to a mere body dump instead of an individual grave.
“Where over there is our son?”, we asked. “I can’t tell you exactly”, Rabbi Parnes answered, “I have to conduct a funeral now”. “You didn’t give us the burial record, yet”, Noach’s dad challenged him. “I don’t have time for that now, call the office about that”, Parnes responded and went into the Holocaust Memorial Chapel that is attached to the cemetery in Lakewood.
We were left on the parking lot, standing there helplessly, lonely, desperate, in pain. Nobody wanted to know, nobody wanted to show, and nobody had an interest in documenting what they did to our son. We went back to our car, only to see Parnes drive off five minutes later, not conducting the ongoing funeral in the chapel, as he said. He lied to us. We called him again, only to be directed to the office once more.
Calling the office of Mt. Sinai Cemetery didn’t shed any light onto the situation. Shmuel Tendler, the owner of the cemetery, sent us an informal letter instead of a burial document stating that Noach was buried at Mt. Sinai Cemetery. No plot, no further information, still no burial document.
We tried to trace back every minute of the events surrounding Noach’s burial. Six months after Noach’s death we went to the hospital to get a copy of the medical records to find out for the attorney when he had been picked up from the hospital. At the counter, the clerk seemed puzzled and said “Weird that you are asking for this now. Yesterday, a funeral home called and tried to obtain information about the parents and the baby’s death”. It was Levine and Sons, who were pressured by our attorney to produce the proper documents surrounding the burial, now trying to get the correct information together. A week later, we got another copy of our medical record, this time it contained an authorization for release of Noach’s body to Levine and Sons with the forged signature of Noach’s dad.
Things started to take a very bad turn.
Levine and Sons sent a copy of the letter to our attorney in which they transferred the responsibility for Noach’s burial to a different funeral home from Brooklyn that we didn’t even know about.
The letter was backdated to a day before Noach was born.
The other funeral home, Jewish Funeral Services of Brooklyn, under the ownership of James Donofrio and Rabbi Shmuel Hartman, had supposedly taken the trip through three States to Lakewood, NJ, to bury our son. Nothing added up. Now two Rabbis from two different Chevra Kadishas were involved in the most simplest of burials. The assigned funeral directors were not present for the burial and had no information about Noach’s location.
We have fought for over a year now and need your help! Our voice has been overheard and our case overlooked. We need to find out what really happened to our child and make sure that in future no baby is being lost or buried in a mass-grave.
What do you think? ... I think these weirdos probably sold the infant on the black market or such..
This is Noach’s story, and it is ours as a family.
In 2019, on January 30th, at 35 weeks pregnant, something didn’t feel right. After an hour, the doctor confirmed that our son’s heart had stopped. Long hours of lonely and quiet labor followed. No nurses rushed to the delivery room when Noach was born, the doctor slowly put his gloves on, knowing there was nothing he could do to bring this baby back to life.
We held Noach for four hours, heart-broken, desperately looking at his perfect face and wishing for only one breath, for a sign of life. He looked as if he was sleeping. The nurses asked us after two hours to arrange for the burial. We were both beside ourselves, overwhelmed by pain and trying to process that we would have to separate from Noach way too soon.
A Chabad Rabbi that we were friendly with offered his help and suggested to use Levine and Sons Funeral Home in Philadelphia, who worked together with the National Association of Chevra Kadisha (NASCK). We had no family close by that could assist us and thus agreed to use Levine and Sons, which we had heard was a reputable funeral home.
And then everything started to become very complicated:
Noach’s dad handed his tiny body over to the staff of Levine and Sons at the hospital. The two men put Noach in a tiny, purple bag and he was taken away from us, forever. We were told that Noach would be buried in a section of the cemetery for stillborn babies. We were okay with that, not yet knowing what that meant. Levine and Sons didn’t give us a contract or any document that described the service that they would perform. We also didn’t know what to ask for because we never had to bury anyone before and were overwhelmed having to welcome our baby dead, and to let him go right after.
We were told that Levine and Sons would be sending us a bill a couple of weeks after the burial. They didn’t want to bother us with that at that moment, they said.
All that we received was a text message from Rabbi Katkovsky, a staff member of Levine and Sons, asking us for $150 weeks later. That’s when we started to be suspicious.
We managed to face the gravesite a couple of months after Noach was born. Levine and Sons had chosen to bury him at Mt. Sinai Cemetery in Lakewood, NJ. We didn’t understand why they took him to that cemetery, two hours outside of Philadelphia, out of all Jewish cemeteries in the Philadelphia area, and never received an explanation for that.
At the cemetery, we couldn’t find his grave and neither a section for stillborn babies. There was no small, freshly dug grave and the staff working at the cemetery had never heard of a section for stillborn babies or anything like that. We were in shock. Now, we had lost Noach again and we had no place to mourn the loss of our beloved child.
Back at home we called Levine and Sons, inquiring about the plot that Noach was given. Adam Levine told us that he didn’t know where Noach was buried and asked us to call Rabbi Parnes from the Lakewood Chevra Kadisha who actually carried out the burial. Again, we didn’t understand why the assigned funeral director from Levine and Sons had no information about the gravesite when they were the ones who were supposed to be present and overseeing the burial. A short phone call with Rabbi Parnes didn’t get us any further. Parnes simply refused to tell us where the gravesite was.
We called Adam Levine again, this time asking for the actual burial record. He didn’t have one, he told us. We demanded to know where our son was buried, but Levine only responded that if we had paid more money, we had more rights to know about the burial.
We were shocked, disgusted and horrified, to say the least. There was no apology, no explanation why nobody documented our son’s burial, and no attempt to help us in any way to find Noach’s remains.
Months of us investigating what had happened followed while trying to deal with the grief and the physical recovery.
With the help of an attorney, we arranged a meeting with Rabbi Parnes at the cemetery, who promised to give us the burial record and to show us the gravesite. At the meeting, he pointed to an area next to the parking lot that can only be described as a mass grave and said “somewhere over there”. One shock followed the next. A mass grave? Pictures of the Holocaust and Auschwitz popped up in our minds and there are no words for what we felt being directed to a mere body dump instead of an individual grave.
“Where over there is our son?”, we asked. “I can’t tell you exactly”, Rabbi Parnes answered, “I have to conduct a funeral now”. “You didn’t give us the burial record, yet”, Noach’s dad challenged him. “I don’t have time for that now, call the office about that”, Parnes responded and went into the Holocaust Memorial Chapel that is attached to the cemetery in Lakewood.
We were left on the parking lot, standing there helplessly, lonely, desperate, in pain. Nobody wanted to know, nobody wanted to show, and nobody had an interest in documenting what they did to our son. We went back to our car, only to see Parnes drive off five minutes later, not conducting the ongoing funeral in the chapel, as he said. He lied to us. We called him again, only to be directed to the office once more.
Calling the office of Mt. Sinai Cemetery didn’t shed any light onto the situation. Shmuel Tendler, the owner of the cemetery, sent us an informal letter instead of a burial document stating that Noach was buried at Mt. Sinai Cemetery. No plot, no further information, still no burial document.
We tried to trace back every minute of the events surrounding Noach’s burial. Six months after Noach’s death we went to the hospital to get a copy of the medical records to find out for the attorney when he had been picked up from the hospital. At the counter, the clerk seemed puzzled and said “Weird that you are asking for this now. Yesterday, a funeral home called and tried to obtain information about the parents and the baby’s death”. It was Levine and Sons, who were pressured by our attorney to produce the proper documents surrounding the burial, now trying to get the correct information together. A week later, we got another copy of our medical record, this time it contained an authorization for release of Noach’s body to Levine and Sons with the forged signature of Noach’s dad.
Things started to take a very bad turn.
Levine and Sons sent a copy of the letter to our attorney in which they transferred the responsibility for Noach’s burial to a different funeral home from Brooklyn that we didn’t even know about.
The letter was backdated to a day before Noach was born.
The other funeral home, Jewish Funeral Services of Brooklyn, under the ownership of James Donofrio and Rabbi Shmuel Hartman, had supposedly taken the trip through three States to Lakewood, NJ, to bury our son. Nothing added up. Now two Rabbis from two different Chevra Kadishas were involved in the most simplest of burials. The assigned funeral directors were not present for the burial and had no information about Noach’s location.
We have fought for over a year now and need your help! Our voice has been overheard and our case overlooked. We need to find out what really happened to our child and make sure that in future no baby is being lost or buried in a mass-grave.
What do you think? ... I think these weirdos probably sold the infant on the black market or such..