The Minyan

The email came in just before dinner on a Thursday in February, when my school had the week off and all I wanted to do was catch up on sleep, see friends, and relax. I recognized the sender, Samara Hutman, and I assumed she was reaching out about the agenda for the next meeting for Remember Us, the organization she oversees and where I serve as teen board president.

But Sam had an unusual request. She wrote that a woman’s grandmother, Suzanne Gottlieb—no relation, despite sharing my last name—had just passed away. Suzanne was an 87-year-old Hungarian Holocaust survivor who had spent the last few years of her life in Los Angeles, and her granddaughter, Carolyn, was one of her only local descendants. Carolyn was having difficulty forming a minyan for the funeral. The email included a forwarded plea to anyone in the Jewish community, and Sam asked if I would go.

No pressure, she wrote, but it would be a mitzvah.

I should mention that the funeral was the next morning, which meant I would have to wake up at 8 a.m. on the last day of my much-needed school vacation. I would have to shower, make my hair look presentable, wear nice clothes, and put myself in the potentially awkward situation of watching people I didn’t know cry hysterically as they said goodbye to a woman I had never met. Or, I could sleep in, work out, and see friends. I’m not proud of this, but I almost said no.

As soon as I clicked “reply,” though, something made me reconsider. I thought about my grandfather, who had been buried less than two years earlier in that same cemetery, and I told Sam I would go.

Now, I began to feel a primal connection to Suzanne. It wasn’t just our last names that bonded us. It was our family stories of triumph. My family got the name Gottlieb from fraudulent papers that my great-grandparents used to immigrate to the United States from antisemitic Poland in the late 1920s. My great-grandparents were my only family on that side who made it out alive before the Holocaust. Suzanne was also a survivor, and I wanted to be there to honor her.

In the car the next morning, Sam and I both hoped that the call for a minyan had been answered. At the cemetery, we met Carolyn, her mother, and her brother, and learned that most of their family lived in Israel and were unable to travel on short notice as the Omicron variant spiked.

There were only a couple people at first, but by the time we were transporting the casket, it was up to eight, and by the time we made it to the burial site, we had nine, and then right before the service, one more came. We finally had enough to practice a Jewish tradition ages old.

Without me, there would have been nine. No minyan. As I watched as the casket was sealed away forever, it was an incredibly melancholy yet beautiful moment as I looked at all the people who had shown up. Other than the three family members, nobody else there had a direct connection to the family. Yet they still came. They still went to support a fellow Jew. And now I was the one holding back tears.

Other than the three family members, nobody else there had a direct connection to the family. Yet they still came.

It occurred to me then that we weren’t actually strangers—not any of us—and that I had the wrong idea about why I was there. I thought that I would be doing a mitzvah for Carolyn and her family, but it turned out that they had actually done a mitzvah for me. By inviting me into this intimate experience, they reminded me that while we’re members of different Gottlieb families, we’re part of something greater: the Jewish community. An unbreakable bond.

This is what Suzanne and so many other survivors lived to share. Decades from now, I imagine telling my own children who want to sleep in and skip something important about my morning at this funeral, and they’ll roll their eyes and sigh like I did, but they’ll go. And when they do, they’ll feel so connected to something bigger—the past and the future and the people right in front of them—that they’ll say, maybe not right away, but eventually, thanks for making me go. And I’ll say, let’s thank Suzanne.

May her memory be a blessing.

Zach Gottlieb is the founder of Talk With Zach, a Gen-Z space for important conversations, and a high school sophomore in Los Angeles.