Their ancestors fled the Nazis and vowed to stay together even in death — but now the Bronx descendants of a Lithuanian village devastated by the Holocaust are warring over who gets to be buried with whom.
At issue are 140 plots in Queens’ Mount Hebron Cemetery governed by the Meretz Relief Association, a Jewish burial society whose members’ ancestors lived in the Lithuanian town of Merkine (Meretz in Yiddish).
Bronx accountant Bruce Group, whose granddad founded the association, alleges that the current leadership is breaking the graveyard’s No. 1 rule — that plots go only to Meretz descendants or their spouses.
“This is what the founding people of Meretz . . . wanted,” Group said. “Somebody needs to stick up for the dead and the living and the people who are going to be buried tomorrow.”
But some gravesite owners — including a 95-year-old great-grandmother who wants to be buried near her family — call Group a troublemaker who brands those he wants to keep out as non-Jewish interlopers.
Catherine Shanfield claims to have converted to Judaism more than 50 years ago and insists that she has every right to the plot she bought because her daughter, Sylvia, is married to Meretz descendant Marvin Cohen.
Shanfield has filed a $1 million suit in Bronx Supreme Court, accusing Group of telling people that she’s a “non-Jew” and shouldn’t be buried there.
Group counters that her religion isn’t the point, though he admits asking to see her conversion papers.
The problem, he said, is that Shanfield is neither a Meretz descendant nor married to one.
In-laws, he argues, simply don’t qualify.