On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Ralph Walter wrote:

> As far as I know, the point (so to speak) of leaving a rock is to show that
> somebody has visited the grave, which is a Mitzvah (generally translated as a
> "good deed," but there's also an element of righteousness involved in showing
> respect for the deceased by visiting his/her grave).  My coreligionists are
> invited to chime in here, and make me look full of shit, as usual.

I personally don't limit the practice to coreligionists.  For example, in
Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford CT, when I came across the grave of Thomas
Gallaudet, founder of the first school for the deaf in the Western
Hemisphere, I felt moved to find a pebble by the side of the drive and
leave it on his small monument as a sign of respect.  I did not do the
same at J.P. Morgan's large tomb in the same cemetery.

> inclined to think that this was an indication of the extent to which my
> father's family considered themselves to be high-class assimilated German
> Jews,

Explanation for those who might have trouble following this: For decades,
there was considered to be a gulf between the German Jews (arriving in the
U.S. mostly pre-1870) and the Eastern European Jews (arriving in the U.S.
mostly post-1890), so much so that they belonged to different synagogues
and generally disdained one another.  The Holocaust and suburbanization
pretty much erased this distinction after 1945.

> As above, perhaps my coreligionists will chime in, and you'll get to
> see them looking down their noses at my wannabe, trying-to-pass Kraut
> ancestors.

Hardly!  My Kest[e]nbaum/Weintraub ancestors came to NY from Budapest,
Hungary, in 1895.  Hungary is something of an anomaly in Eastern Europe
because at the time it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and German
was the offical language.  It appears that my relatives tried to shade
themselves over into being earlier-arriving German Jews, and to pretend
that the Yiddish they spoke was German.  In other words, they were
trying-to-pass *AS* Kraut.  My chess champion first cousin grew up (in
Culver City, as you know) thinking that our Budapest-born mutual
great-grandfather Benjamin Kestnbaum was actually from Germany.

> PS-- Anybody still awake who knows what "logorrhea" means?

It was the title of the poetry section in our high school paper.

                                   Larry

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
Washtenaw County Commissioner, 4th District
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com
Mailing address: P.O. Box 2563, Ann Arbor MI 48106

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