Even as a little boy Michael Hirsch loved to visit the cemeteries.
His family would take him to visit the grave of his great -grandmother and soon came to the cemeteries as museums containing stories and secrets of the past.
Over the years, Mr. Hirsch, a historian and a genealogue, felt a kind of relationship with the dead and to take care of his graves.
Now 68, he has visited more cemeteries than he can count, clean tombstones and often honor people according to their religion, leave stones on Jewish tombstones and palm crosses for Christian during Easter.
One day, last November, Mr. Hirsch arrived at most of the Holy Trinity cemetery – 23 hectares in the Bushwick region in Brooklyn, tucked next to the elevated metro line, which carries the train L to Canarsia.
Approximately 25,000 people are buried at most of the Holy Trinity, many of which immigrants from the working class from Germany, who were parishioners of nearby Catholic churches.
Their lives were modest, and their graves, which were not marked with an expensive buttock but wooden cross or metal brands in the shape of traditional tombstones.
Several visitors attract the cemetery, but Mr. Hirsch has a special kindness for the place.
When he arrived on November 29, he was surprised to find that Gates attached a padlock and blocked with a concrete slab. The security went through and opened a high cast iron door.
What he saw when he walked was overcome by sadness, unable to speak.
Brands, hundreds of them, were gone – harvested, pulled out of the ground like crops. Most of the Holy Trinity were now an open wound field.
The desecration of hundreds of graves was Shanda, a shame, a crime that he thought when most of the Holy Trinity went through.
He didn’t know who would be so low to steal the sights honored. But he wanted to do something about it.
Its mitzvah
The way people refer to Graves have been developing for millennia. Homo poured, ancient hominin species, Buried their dead in caves and engraved walls. Ancient shepherds of sheep in East Africa eliminated the burial ground of the pit and placed large rocks over the corpses. The old Greeks Used chambers lined with gold.
When the majority of the Holy Trinity opened in 1851, for the German Catholic Church in nearby Williamsburg, Brooklyn, almost all graves were marked with wooden crosses. The philosophy of simple brands was to show the living that everyone was the same at death.
In the end, the majority of the Holy Trinity was filled with metal brands. They became popular in the United States at the end of the 18th century, thanks to a monumental bronze society in Bridgeport in Conn. In fact, it was zinc – much cheaper than bronze, but robust and rust resistant. Past newspaper stories about the cemetery suggest that other brands were made of iron, almost worthless metal.
But at least some of the brands were copper that can be sold for up to $ 3 per pound and are often stolen from homes or businesses. In 1990, the police arrested two men who tried to slip with three copper brands hidden in the shopping cart, according to the article New York Daily News.
Now someone seemed to have come to the rest.
Mr. Hirsch began calling the day after his discovery. The Catholic cemeteries, which keep the burial ground for the diocese in Brooklyn, referred to the public relations manager, who gave him little information. An officer of the table in the 83rd district covered by the cemetery told him that the police knew about theft, but that no one was arrested, Mr. Hirsch said.
The last theft could be launched in April, when the police received a complaint that the chain locked the front gate.
Nothing was reported, but in July the police received another news from the cemetery: someone stole five metal brands. In August, five more were carried out, the police said, then several more were in September, when the cemetery managers met with the commanding officer of the district to talk about how to prevent more theft. There have been no theft since then, the police said.
Mr. Hirsch, who determined to learn the scope of theft that uses stick and fight to go for long distances last month to record all the missing brands and record them into a small ball with a ball pen.
So far he said he had 1,300.
Mr. Hirsch could catalog the range of losses, but 1,300 brands were too much to replace one man. And the metal was gone forever – it most likely flows through the machine to disguise its origin and sold as scrap.
His devotion to the dead may seem extreme. But he calls his work Mitzvah. (A really big Mitzvah, says and adds an explosion).
About 18 years ago, the fat poisonous ivy covered 64 tombstones in the Barona Hirsch Staren Iceland cemetery, including that belonging to the belonging Beckie Neubauer19 -year -old Austrian immigrant who died in Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.
For nearly 20 years, he committed to the lives of 146 clothing workers who died on March 25, 1911, when the fire broke the Greenwich Village factory, a disaster that exposed disgusting working conditions, powered the workers’ movement and led to new safety standards in the workplace.
He found relatives of the victims, some of whom did not even know they had no connection with the tragedy, and told them where their family members were buried.
After he found ivy, he dressed a protective suit, glasses, heavy gloves and shoes and hackl until he was cleaned. It took about a week.
His work is taxation and even dangerous. But Mr. Hirsch, who never married and has no children, has freedom obsessed with it. Despite the neuropathic pain, which made it difficult for him to keep his balance, and back and neck pain that slowed him down. He fell three times in cemeteries and fears that one day he would have a fatal fall or will be hit by a decaying tombstone.
“It’s very easy to die in the cemetery,” he said.
Reminder
That day he found that most of the Holy Trinity was looted, Mr. Hirsch came to visit the grave of another victim of the triangle shirt: Theresa Schmidt32-year-old immigrant from Austria-Hungarian.
According to Mr. Hirsch, Mrs. Schmidt never had a tombstone. So last April he bought a stone grave for her and had it installed.
Her brand remains where Mr. Hirsch left. But most of the Holy Trinity lost a lot.
Theft “exceeds decades”, said John Quaglione, a spokesman for the diocese in Brooklyn. The theft of the brands has taken place since at least 1950, which makes it difficult to calculate the total number of monuments that have been taken, Mr. Quaglione said.
This also means that “communication with family members can be difficult,” he said. “But we’re working on keeping a record of vandalism when we’re warned.”
After the last breakthrough of the Catholic cemeteries, “coordinated with NYPD and hired private safety,” he said. “We continue to prevent any form of vandalism in the cemetery.”
In the months since then, most of the Holy Trinity became a brick city of the dead. A razor wire was installed on the fence, which was wrapped around it, separated from the neighboring Evergreens cemetery, 225-Acroval necropolis, which is in the national register of historical places.
Evergreens welcomes visitors for stars and arborists lead tours between their dogwood, sweet and European beech trees. Its decorated statues and complicated mausoleum indicate graves of 538,000 people, including Tap dancer Bill RobinsonKnown as a fighting; Jazz saxophonist Lester Young;; and Martin Johnson Heade, Hudson River School School Painter whose landscape was sold for millions of dollars.
Through the shaving conductor, the permanent residents of the majority of the Holy Trinity are largely unknown.
Mr. Hirsch hoped that the violation of the majority of the Holy Trinity was reminiscent of the New Yorkers not to forget the dead to be outraged when they were desecrated their resting land.
After calling for the diocese and the police, he began in contact with the offspring of people buried in the maximum trio.
Family brand
January 22 Mr. Hirsch called Stephen Pytko in his house on Long Island and asked him if he had buried relatives in most of the Holy Trinity.
Mr. Pytko, confused, said yes.
I have some bad news, Mr. Hirsch told him.
The elegant brand that once stood over his family land was gone.
The monument was a striking, blue -gray structure called Pytko written diagonally through the brand in big, gold letters.
Mr. Hirsch has always admired how well it was, and immediately noticed his absence, because it was just a few meters from the Schmidt brand.
Mr. Pytko was amazed when he learned that someone had stolen.
“Who would do something like that just for a few dollars?” said.
January 27. He rode from Long Island with his wife Linda and his son Andrew to meet Mr. Hirsch in the cemetery.
Mr. Pytko has not been there since 1970, when he was 13, at the funeral of his aunt Mary Pytko, who would force him to accumulate plates from a roast pot or a bowl of chicken soup when visiting Brooklyn.
Mr. Pytko followed Mr. Hirsch to a snowy cemetery. It was a long, stable walk from the majestic brick entrance to the far corner of the cemetery, where the memorial was once a bag.
Mr. Hirsch leaned on his razor stick.
“It looks like a prison camp,” he said.
Linda Pytko shook her head, destroyed in loss, and disappointed that the diocesan officials had not notified the public.
The group threw itself at the scene of the funeral and stared down at the rectangular wooden frame, which once supported the brand engraved by the names of the relatives Mr. Pytko: his grandparents, Joseph and Zophia; his uncle, John; And Mary, the last buried in most of the Holy Trinity.
The family bent down, made a sign of the cross and prayed. The train was yelled and pierced the silence.
Mr. Pakko then approached the empty frame and looked inside, one thought he was repeating in his head: I shouldn’t wait until he returned. When Mr. Hirsch was a little boy, the Jewish cemeteries were full of families visiting dead during the highest holy days. Now, he said, rarely sees anyone standing at the grave.
But some days – such days – Mr. Hirsch helps change it.
Sundays with most of the Holy Trinity, although the recent snowfall slowed his hunt on the missing brand. When the cemetery thaws, he said he would return with his laptop and represent what the dead lost.
He feels that someone has to.
Alain DelaquerièreResearch contributed.
