Tag #118242 - Interview #87371 (Fani Cojocariu)

My father is buried here, in Dorohoi, at the Jewish cemetery. The Jewish custom is to dress the dead in white. Special clothes are tailored for this occasion, there are tailors who still make them. We sat shivah after our father died, all three of us. We sat shivah both after our mother and after our father. You place something on the floor, a carpet, a pillow, something, and you sit there for 8 days. And who could come to bring us food? We had to cook ourselves, we had to stand up, cook. And they say you aren’t allowed to do that, it’s a sin to stand up from there. But since we couldn’t rely on anyone to bring us food… But I don’t know anymore, whether you’re supposed to sleep there during the night, or you can stand up and sleep on the bed. I don’t remember that, I don’t remember how we did that. And we paid someone, a Jew like us, who actually had a connection to our family, he was actually a friend of my father’s as a young man – his name was Rabinovici, he had a store in the old days –, and he recited prayers for my father for an entire year. And that’s what he said: “It would be good if you had his name mentioned in the prayer for the dead every month at the synagogue.” And every month throughout the year I would buy liquor, crackers, according to Jewish customs.