i know what you’re saying: You’re saying, “Abrams, what did you do for Tisha B’Av?” i’ll tell you.

i spent a lovely hour with a Simon … i believe his last name was … Rottenberg? Honest.

A Kiryas Joel resident, he had read my blog — the very favorite blog of the good people of Kiryas Joel, apparently  (hello, Hasidim! Hello!) — and called me to say he’d like to visit the Snake Hill Cemetery. Since i have the key now, i said sure, i’d be glad to let him in. He showed up at my house as promised, in the standard-issue KJ van with his 3 adorable sons (one tall one, one middle-sized one and one little one), and off we went in two cars, as i had to come back home afterwards to change for work, and they were going straight back to KJ.

This turns out to be one knowledgeable guy. He not only KNEW that Joshua ben Mordecai Falk was Temple Beth Jacob‘s (and therefore Newburgh’s) first rabbi, and that Falk had written the first Hebrew book (other than the Bible or prayerbooks) published in the U.S., but he had actually READ it. All i ever knew about it was that it was a commentary on the Talmud’s “Ethics of the Fathers,” and that he’d come to the U.S. to get it published. Simon asked me why Falk needed to come here from Poland to publish his book,  and I had to tell him I had no idea why. By 1854, wasn’t there  a large Jewish population in Poland, and wouldn’t it have been much easier to publish a book in Hebrew there? That’s a good question for me to look into. He also told me that Falk also had written that he had a disagreement with the TBJ congregation over their interpretation of Judaism — i guess he had never heard of Reform in the Old Country and disapproved of it. After all, in that year, there was still no organization to ordain Reform rabbis. And yet he agreed to serve, albeit very briefly, as rabbi of our Reform congregation. Why, Simon asked? My small knowledge of the history of Judaism in the U.S. comes almost exclusively from Nathan Glazer’s classic “American Judaism,” but i was proud to impart to my new pal one fact i am sure of: In the mid-1800s, the great majority of German-Jewish immigrants to this country were rationalistic, intellectual Reform Jews by nature and philosophy, though there was no “certified Reform” process yet, and the Orthodox came only later, in the great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe of the 1880s and beyond.

Anyhoo, once past the absolutely perfect sign i’d recently purchased from my friend Sue Young at Design by Sue on Liberty Street (“This historic Jewish cemetery, consecrated in the late 1800s, has been the property of Temple Beth Jacob in the City of Newburgh since 1916″) and inside the cemetery gate, now secured by the lovely red padlock i’d bought from Liberty Locksmith, Simon and his sons got to work, lifting up the overturned headstones, digging lichen out of some of the letters, and quickly and surely reading the names and — most impressively — the dates of birth and death of the folks buried there. LIKE A COMPLETE DOPE, i had brought along neither my camera nor, more outrageously, even a pad and pen. And he gave me so much info! i never asked his occupation but he seemed to know everything about cemeteries: He instantly recognized the remnants of a small chain hooked to one, barely-protruding obelisk-type stone as being part of the boundary of a marked-off section that was meant for one family. i hardly thought that THAT was conclusive evidence, so he lifted up a few of the nearby, tumbled-down headstones and, sure enough, they were all from the same family. And he said that the cemetery had been cared for by SOMEONE through about 1900, because he noticed a stone with that date had been once broken, but then repaired with caulk. We now could, if we wanted to at great expense, send off a piece of the caulk (he said, peeling off a piece of it) for analysis and find out in exactly what year it was manufactured.

Simon also, noting the large percentage of infants and young kids buried there (in one family, a sister had died on Dec. 4 of one year, and her brother 10 days later), came up with a novel theory: That perhaps Big Rock Cemetery Association, which conveyed the property to Bikur Cholim Benevolent Society on Feb. 1, 1890, did so because there was some kind of rampant illness (flu-like?) killing so many children that they wanted to create a special area to bury their remains and a special group to handle them. It was already known, i guess, that you can get sick from handling dead bodies of people who died of illness, and maybe most folks didn’t want their loved ones buried near these “Plague People,” either??

An intriguing theory, but it doesn’t explain why the father and son who died in some kind of “disaster” (Simon translated it, “accident”) together, are buried there, too. i’d originally thought maybe it was a cemetery for the very poorest Jews, who couldn’t afford a plot, but i think Rabbi Freedman told me the father and son were “Cohanim” so that idea might not work, either.

So i’m sticking with my fantasy that it was simply a case of, back in the late 1800s, old Moishe decided he hated his former partner Murray, who’d been the firm’s accountant but turned out to be a crook, so he went around the congregation saying, “Hey! You don’t want to lie forever next to that crook Murray in Big Rock Cemetery, do ya? Let’s buy some land in the nice, peaceful woods on the southwest part of the city, and make a cemetery for ourselves out of that!” And he succeeded in getting a few families to go along with that.

What? You got a better idea? Let’s hear it!

The time seemed to fly by, during which Simon advised me, among other things,  that almost ANY foam-type cleanser (“like mousse,” he said, but he couldn’t have meant hair mousse, could he?), sprayed onto headstones, will take the dirt off of them. So now, i’m off to Target to buy some foaming hand soap, and see what happens!

i know you’re not supposed to be happy on Tisha B’Av, but for me, a cooler Tisha B’Av had never happened.