Tuleh’s daughter came to the hospital and took pictures to send to Israel. Around the same time, Shirley took pictures of the baby in Israel to send to her mother.
Returning to Daughters of Jacob in May, Freida Sima eagerly awaited the pictures, but on Friday morning, June 15, she complained of chest pains. Four hours later, she closed her eyes forever.
The airmail envelope with the pictures arrived in Monday’s mail, a day after she was buried next to her beloved Mordche (Max) at Wellwood Cemetery. When Shirley picked it up at the Home after getting up from shiva in New York with her uncles and aunt, she found it next to her mother’s book of techinot, prayers for women in Yiddish, that Freida Sima had received in 1916 from her Tante Molly.
The bookmark had been set to an invocation Freida Sima had often turned to as she grew older: “Prayer for a woman who has to live with her children in her old age.”
The end of a person’s physical existence, however, is not always the end of a story, as we will see in the next chapter of this series.
This installment of the Freida Sima series is dedicated to the memory of Freida Sima’s grandmother, Malka Haller Scharf (Malka bat Elik), whose 100th yarhzeit was Elul 6, which this year fell on September 9.
