Three generations. Seventy-two years. One chapel.

זכרונם לברכה — may their memory be a blessing. The phrase, which we hear so often that it loses meaning, is the work of this firm: to make the memory be the blessing.

Aaron, 1953

Aaron Bernstein arrived in Pittsburgh in 1947, on a transport from a displaced-persons camp in Bremen, Germany. His first wife and two daughters — Miriam and Chana, ages eight and five — had died at Auschwitz in 1943. He was thirty-four years old when he came down the gangplank in New York. He came to Pittsburgh because a cousin from his town in Galicia, Yossel Bernstein, had a butcher shop on Murray Avenue and had agreed to take him in.

For four years Aaron worked at the shop. He learned American English well enough to greet customers. He attended the Conservative shul at Beth Shalom on Friday nights, said kaddish for his daughters at every minyan that would have him, and slept on the cot above the shop. In 1952 he married Esther, a widow from Salonika who had lost her husband and mother in the deportations of 1943. They were married at Beth Shalom in a small ceremony on a Tuesday morning.

That winter Aaron told the rabbi that he was thinking about a funeral chapel. The rabbi did not laugh. There were three Jewish funeral firms in Pittsburgh in 1952, and none was specifically dedicated to traditional observance; families who wanted a strict taharah, a simple pine casket, and burial within twenty-four hours were patching together arrangements between chevra kadisha members and whatever firm could be reached. Aaron had spent the war years thinking about what was owed the dead.

Sanctuary opened in March 1953 in a narrow brick building on Forbes Avenue that had previously been a tailor's shop. The first burial — a man named Yehuda Friedman, ninety-one years old, who had lived in Squirrel Hill since 1908 — was that same week. Aaron directed the firm for thirty-three years.

The chevra kadisha and the office.

Esther Bernstein co-founded the firm. She did not call herself a co-founder, and the licensing of the period would not have allowed her to be listed as one, but the firm did not function without her. She coordinated the chevra kadisha, taught two generations of Pittsburgh women how to perform the taharah, kept the office books, and answered the phone every night Aaron was at the chapel.

When Esther died in 1998, three rabbis spoke at her funeral. Beth Shalom set up the shiva minyan at the Bernsteins' apartment above the chapel. The firm was closed for the seven days, and the chevra kadisha — the same women Esther had trained — performed her taharah.

David, 1986

Aaron's son with Esther, David, was born in 1955 in the apartment above the chapel. He grew up listening for the phone, learning the difference between an eleven-PM call and a three-AM call, and watching his father walk to the chapel at all hours. He apprenticed at Sanctuary through high school and earned his funeral director's license in 1979 from the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science.

He took over the firm in 1986, when Aaron retired at seventy-eight. Under David, Sanctuary expanded its work with Reform congregations through the 1990s — without ever stepping back from its Conservative and Modern Orthodox families. He developed Sanctuary's now-customary practice of placing a chevra kadisha-trained shomer at the chapel from the moment a body arrives until the moment of burial, regardless of how observant the family is or whether the family has requested shemira.

David retired in 2018 and turned the firm over to his son Daniel. He is eighty-one years old and lives three blocks from the chapel. He answers the phone on weekend evenings, when Daniel is at home with the children.

Daniel, 2018

Daniel trained at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, where he earned a Master's in Jewish Communal Service and ordination as a chazzan. He served six years as a chazzan at Beth Shalom in Squirrel Hill before earning his funeral director's license in 2014 and joining his father at the chapel. He took over the firm in 2018.

He has directed Sanctuary through the most demanding year in its history. In October 2018, the firm — together with two other Pittsburgh Jewish funeral homes and the chevra kadisha — served the families of the eleven people killed at the Tree of Life synagogue, three blocks from the Sanctuary chapel. The week required everything seventy years of the firm had taught about coordination with rabbis, cemeteries, shomrim, and the chevra kadisha. The firm came through it because of seventy years of practice. The chapel does not commemorate that week with photography on the website; the families' grief is theirs to commemorate, not ours.

Daniel lives in Squirrel Hill with his wife Sarah, a pediatric oncologist at Children's Hospital, and their three children — Aaron (named for his great-grandfather), Mara, and Yael. He speaks regularly at the Pittsburgh Jewish Community Foundation on questions of ritual and observance, and at the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association conference on the practical coordination of traditional Jewish funerals across denominational lines.

The chapel and the community.

The Sanctuary chapel is two blocks from Beth Shalom and three blocks from Tree of Life. It has stood at 5862 Forbes Avenue since the building was renovated for the firm in 1953. The structure is small — twenty-eight seats in the chapel, room for a hundred standing — and the firm has never wished to make it larger.

Across seventy-two years, Sanctuary has served families from every congregation in Pittsburgh's Jewish community, from the strict Modern Orthodox shul on Forbes to the Reform congregation at Rodef Shalom and the small unaffiliated minyanim that gather in living rooms. We have served chevra kadisha members and their families. We have served rabbis and their families. We have served the families of people who had not entered a synagogue in fifty years.

The practice that runs through all of it is the practice the firm was founded for: ensure the body is treated with kavod ha-met (honor for the dead); coordinate the chevra kadisha for the taharah; arrange the shomrim from death to burial; place the body in a simple wooden aron; bury within twenty-four hours where law and cemetery permit; coordinate the shiva minyan, the meals, and the home preparation; return for the unveiling eleven months on.

That is the firm. It will be the firm under Daniel; and if one of Daniel's three children chooses to take it on — Aaron is fourteen, Mara is eleven, Yael is eight — it will be the firm in the next generation. And if not, then the firm will end when Daniel ends, with the same care it began with.

The firm is a vessel. The vessel is what holds the grief while the family holds the memory.