Tag #147686 - Interview #98803 (Reyna Lidgi)

The coffin was put on the table in the apartment in ‘Makriopolska’ street. According to the Jewish religion the dead person should not be dressed, he should be placed in the coffin after being washed and covered in a white sheet. The coffin was then covered and afterwards nobody had the right to look at the dead man. All that was done. It was a rainy day. And they came to take the body. The women, then, didn’t have the right to follow the coffin. Only the men went. After he had been buried, my uncles and my aunts returned or Rebeka Beniesh, Mois Beniesh’s wife and Milka Beniesh, Miko (Nisim) Beniesh’s wife. And my mum and I had to sit on the floor, according to the Jewish ritual, and stay there for seven days. Apart from that, according to the ritual, the underwear is cut because it is nearest to the body and you have to feel the pain from the loss. They dressed me in black, removed the white collar from my black school uniform, they put black socks on my feet. Mum was entirely dressed in black. She went into mourning and even dyed her underwear black because her love was very strong. We didn’t change our underwear and didn’t take a bath for seven days as the ritual requires. While the sitting takes place, the so-called ‘insietti’ in Ladino, ‘insietti’ meaning ‘seven days’, the bereaved don’t have the right to prepare food for themselves. The food should be brought by relatives and they agree on who will bring food for lunch, who for dinner and they stay together with the bereaved, but they sit on chairs whereas the bereaved sit on the floor. These seven days are quite hard because the relatives ask the bereaved how the person died, what happened and what… and all this makes the situation terribly depressing. For me it was extremely difficult because I loved my father very much. And we had a lot of relatives who were bringing food, but not every day and sometimes mum had to stand up and prepare something for eating from our modest supplies, which had remained after dad’s death and so came the seventh day. On the seventh day the women have the right to go and see where the dead man is buried.

Mum remained without any resources because everything we had was mainly from the companies that dad had assisted and they paid him, or, as it turned out later, some of them hadn’t paid him anything.