Manhattan, NY – A man who refuses to allow a funeral home to cremate his 105-year-old great-aunt began pressuring the woman several years before she died, the executor of her estate said Saturday.
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Leibert Greenberg, tasked with carrying out Ethel Baar’s final wishes, said the woman didn’t want to be buried and made that clear to James Pollock, her grandnephew.
“[Pollock] was badgering and harassing her that she should adopt orthodoxy at burial, but that was not her wish. She was very clear,” said Greenberg, who is also Baar’s nephew. “She rejected his bullying several times.”
Baar asked in her June 1999 will to be cremated like her late husband. She died in September, and her body has been in a cooler at the Gramercy Park Memorial Chapel since then. The Manhattan funeral home – locked between Pollock, who wants her buried, and other relatives, who want her wish to be cremated granted – has asked a court to intervene, (as was reported here on Vos Iz Neias last night).
Loved ones say Baar was an outspoken, independent thinker who left her North Dakota home as a young woman partly to escape the Jewish Orthodox community she was born into. In recent years, she lived in Peter Cooper Village and the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale.
“He’s very Orthodox. That’s fine, but we live in the United States and Judaism is a very big tent,” Greenberg said of Pollock. “What he’s succeeded in doing is taking away the right of a lot of people to grieve for the loss of a very dear loved one.”
A grandniece wrote a letter to the funeral home, urging it to bury Baar.
“Apparently, only one out of many of Aunt Ethel’s relatives has some objection to the cremation process, and this should not override her wishes,” Joan Klivans said.
Greenberg said it many not be the first time Pollock has pulled such a stunt and may have tried, and failed, to stop another dead relative’s cremation.
“She had no use for orthodoxy; she just wasn’t that kind of person at all,” her cousin William Wolf said. “She is the last person this should happen to.”
Pollock’s lawyer, Marc Kurzmann, did not return messages yesterday. Workers at the funeral home declined to comment.
shame on her family!! The funny (or sad) thing is that her Neshama is screaming that she shouldn’t be cremated May Hashem bless this nephew that he succeed in doing whats right!! Liberalism is a disease!!!
A shanda, that a Jewish person cannot be buried for two months! Cremation is a goyish custom, and its use reminds me of what the Nazis did. There are some reform Jews who use cremation, and then bury the cremated remains in a Jewish cemetery.
What’s the quarrel? What’s a relative’s conviction to supersede those of the deceased herself and one she has made perfectly clear?
She had her husband cremated, I would say, in this case, let her be cremated too and she’ll reap her ‘reward’ up there….
Let her rot in the morgue, its well deserved
To what extent is someone supposed to go to bury someone? – this women and most of her relatives are against her being buried I guess if this pollac guy succeeds its a sign from heaven and lo aliany the other way around
Let’s see… you’re all saying that her last wishes don’t count because…? Hypothetically speaking, what if the shoe was on the other foot, hmm? You talk about halacha, but imagine the dangerous precedent y’all would set by ignoring someone’s last wishes. Say, someone who WANTS to be buried k’halacha – a BT or ger/geores – and their family objects?
Just remember that burial k’halacha is your belief – not hers – and taking a stance like this could have serious ramifications…