A 91-year-old Holocaust survivor has received a Jewish burial thanks to the efforts of a north-west London rabbi.
The Folkestone care home in which Jessie Salmon was a resident had requested via the Association of Jewish Refugees that a rabbi speak to her.
Rabbi Menachem Junik of the Beis Gavriel Lubavitch Federation Synagogue in Hendon was put in touch with the home to arrange a visit to Jessie, who had no surviving family, most of her relatives having been murdered at Auschwitz.
“When I got the call from the care home, they wanted me to come the following week,” the rabbi explained. “But I heard the urgency in her request and asked to meet her over Zoom the following day.”
He recalled that Jessie didn’t say a lot but was “connecting with her eyes, saying: “I told her how much the community cares about her. I said the Shema prayer with her and promised to visit. I got a sense that she felt at peace with herself afterwards.”
Jessie passed away 12 hours later and Rabbi Junik was informed by the care home that she had written a will requesting to be buried at the local district cemetery. Rabbi Junik vowed to organise a Jewish burial: “I felt I had to go all out to give her the resting place she needed.”
The rabbi — who is also Jewish Care’s spiritual and pastoral lead — shared Jessie’s story with members of his congregation on Shabbat.
Galvanised into action, 15 Beis Gavriel members accompanied Rabbi Junik to Folkestone in advance of the funeral, scheduled to take place hours before Shavuot.
They consecrated the burial plot, placing soil from Israel inside the grave and gaining permission from the pallbearers to conduct the funeral themselves. Following the ceremony, the plot was cordoned off with string to designate it as separate from the rest of the cemetery.
Jessie
Jessie in her younger days (Photo: Handout)
David Abramson, a Beis Gavriel founder member, was among those at the funeral. He said he had wanted to ensure Jessie wasn’t “alone” in her final resting place.
He added: “Just before Yom Kippur, a group of us from Beis Gavriel went on an educational trip to Auschwitz and I brought back two small stones from inside the gas chambers.
"Before leaving home for Jessie’s funeral, I picked up one of these stones and placed it inside her grave during the funeral.
"I felt it was a way for her to be with her family in her final resting place — and also, on a wider scale, for all those victims of the Holocaust who were connected to her and who weren’t afforded a Jewish burial.”
Jessie was born in Haifa in 1931 to French parents. Her family returned to France in the mid-1930s so her father could help raise awareness of the Zionist cause among the community there.
When war broke out, they found themselves trapped. Jessie was originally taken to a safe house in Belgium but following the Nazi invasion was put on the last boat to England by members of the Zionist party.
She never saw her parents again. Her mother, along with 45 of her relatives, was murdered at Auschwitz; her father was executed as a member of the French resistance in 1944.
Traumatised by this, and by the circuitous route she was forced to take to start a new life in Britain — at the age of eight, she was interned in a detention camp in Alexandra Palace — Jessie spent much of her adult life actively denying her Jewish identity, although she did spend time on a kibbutz.
However, to the surprise of her carers, in mid-May she expressed a sudden interest in speaking to a rabbi.
Reflecting on her funeral, Rabbi Junik told the JC: “What was most amazing to me was how many people came out a few hours before Yomtov for a woman they had never met.
“This is a measure of the care, love and respect we as a community have for our survivors and also a reflection of how much importance we place on Jewish burial.
“I am so grateful to all the people and organisations involved in this endeavour.”
