R
abbi Rachmiel Rothberger is the Jewish community liaison at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx New York.
What I Do
I serve as a connection between the hospital and its home hospice program and the greater Jewish community. My goal is to help make difficult situations more bearable for patients and their families by promoting the feeling of imo anochi b’tzarah that they’re not alone in their time of need — that they haven’t been abandoned by the Jewish community and that their religious needs are attended to atCalvary.
What That Means
I helped upgrade our Bikur Cholim room from a closet to a fully functioning hospitality suite including on-site Shabbos accommodations for families. We made the building Shabbos friendly and it’s now also included in the community eiruv. I also educate the hospital staff about the sensitivities of the Jewish community — that keeping Shabbos means they likely won’t use the call bells on Shabbos that they set up KosherLamps and so on. Other things too like not to open the double-wrapped and sealed kosher food and not to interrupt a patient who’s davening. I spend a significant amount of time educating families about traditional Jewish funerals and trying to locate plots for patients both before and after they’re niftar. We work very closely with Rabbi Elchonon Zohn — he’s the director of the Chevra Kadisha of the Vaad Harabonim of Queens and the president and founder of the National Association of Chevra Kadisha — and he helped us develop a form that we place in front of every Jewish patient’s chart instructing the staff not to handle the body after the patient dies. When possible I prepare the niftar for the chevra kaddisha or funeral home. I also guide families when it comes to making funeral arrangements —we work with the Hebrew Free Burial Association and have arrangements with local funeral homes to provide a halachic grave and service for financially pressed families. I also serve as a supportive presence for the staff — continuously dealing with dying patients and their families can be devastating.
The Season I Never Sleep
Before and after Shabbos or Yom Tov is especially busy. We make sure our Bikur Cholim room is well stocked because we never know who will be coming in right before. It’s not unusual to receive a call from a family member of a patient in a neighboring hospital who needs food for Shabbos. Motzaei Shabbos I’ve received calls from families whose relatives were niftar on Shabbos and they needed help arranging the levayos and kevuros. I remember the first time the chevra kaddisha called me to help expedite the death certificate of a home hospice program patient so the niftar would be able to make the flight to Eretz Yisrael that night. Baruch Hashem we got everything done on time and since then we’ve worked out a system with the doctors that if a patient is niftar on Shabbos we can have the death certificate right away so the family can make a flight if necessary. There was one patient who was niftar on his son’s Shabbos sheva brachos. To give the family an extra sense of comfort I came into the hospital late at night to sit shemirah and help the chevra kaddisha with the hotza’ah.
