When a Cemetery Wedding Was Used to End the Spanish Flu - The New York Times

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Even as New York reopens ever so cautiously, couples hoping to stage big, boisterous weddings in the city still have a good wait ahead of them before they receive a go-ahead.

Weddings were among the first large gatherings banned in most places after the pandemic took hold in March. More than 350,000 couples across the nation have had to postpone ceremonies, according to The Knot, a wedding planning website, while many others slashed guest lists to single digits or used online services like Zoom to share the day.

But a century ago in New York, a very large wedding took place — not in spite of the Spanish flu epidemic ravaging the city but precisely because of it. What’s more, both the dead and the living were at the ceremony.

The Nov. 4, 1918, edition of The Evening World had the story:

“In Mount Hebron Cemetery, Miss Rose Schwartz, No. 369 East Tenth Street, stood beside Abraham Lachterman, No. 638 East Eleventh Street, yesterday afternoon, and before them stood Rabbi Unger, who performed a wedding ceremony.

“The tradition upon which the couple acted is an ancient Jewish one which declares that the only way to stop a plague is to hold a marriage ceremony in the cemetery.”

The newspaper said 2,000 people cheered on the couple for offering themselves up to stop the epidemic.

Credit...The Evening World

That strange gathering in Queens was known as a shvartse khasene, or “black wedding,” a Jewish ritual from Eastern Europe. During the Spanish flu epidemic, which claimed more than 20,000 lives in New York City and tens of millions of victims worldwide, the same ceremony was held in cemeteries in Philadelphia and Winnipeg, Manitoba. (In the latter case, a small group of Jews simultaneously conducted a funeral at the opposite side of the cemetery.)

The idea behind the black wedding, the Public Ledger of Philadelphia reported at the time, was that “the attention of God would be called to the affliction of their fellows if the most humble man and woman among them should join in marriage in the presence of the dead.”

A recent article in Tablet, an American Jewish online magazine, mentioned a more disconcerting aspect of the macabre events, which may have developed in response to cholera outbreaks, and what “humble” could have meant when it came to the bride and groom. Black weddings, he wrote, “generally involved finding two of the most marginal residents of the town (whether orphans, beggars, or the physically handicapped) and forcibly marrying them.”

Whether that description would have applied to the Lachterman gathering is hard to say, since we know little beyond what is mentioned in that brief newspaper article.

Also unknown is the fate of the marriage. Were there any children? Did Abraham and Rose live happily ever after? An orphan named Rose Schwartz shows up in a 1910 census, and an “unable to work” Abraham Lachterman appears in the census three decades later, but it would be conjecture to pinpoint these as the Hebron Cemetery bride and groom.

What does seem certain is that the marriage actually did take place; the City Clerk’s office confirms it, though the groom is listed as Lochterman, not Lachterman, and the bride as Rossie, not Rose.

As far as the fate of the black wedding ritual itself, some experts had speculated that the three 1918 ceremonies might well have represented its last hurrah. But just this March, another such ceremony, albeit an apparently modernized, socially-distant one, was held in a cemetery in Israel.

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The biggest unresolved issue regarding New York’s black wedding may well be, at least to those of us not wholly in the embrace of science and logic, whether it worked. That is, did it actually end the 1918 flu epidemic in the city?

If that question was on the minds of the readers of The Evening World’s black wedding story so long ago, an answer of sorts was provided in another article just to its left. The headline: INFLUENZA NEARING END.

“Great improvement in the influenza situation was reported for the twenty-four hours ending at 10 o’clock this morning,” the article said, adding, “Board of Health officials declared the epidemic was waning fast and that in a very short time the whole trouble would be past.”

That conclusion was largely correct, at least in New York City. “After November 4, the only item left on the Board of Health’s influenza docket was to process the glut of hiring and compensation forms in the wake of a dramatic emergency expansion of the public health work force,’” according to a 2010 Public Health Reports article.

Of course, the Drs. Faucis and Birxes of the day would not have bestowed any credit for that success on Rabbi Unger or the Lachtermans, but would have pointed instead to quarantines, good hygienic practices and social distancing as the real victors in the battle.

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When a Cemetery Wedding Was Used to End the Spanish Flu - The New York Times
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