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retrieve Torron’s body. He came prepared. To guard
against the stench, he brought a second casket, large
enough to accommodate Torron’s casket, which the
workers lower into place. Then Donofrio spreads two
8.8-oz. packets of espresso coffee between the two.
“If there’s a better way to soak up the smell, I haven’t
seen it,” he says. After the crew helps squeeze the
oversize coffin into the van, Donofrio sets off on a
37-mile trip to the opposite side of the city to bury
Torron for a second time.
As the Grand Caravan pulls under the arches ofHFBA’s Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Is-
land, Donofrio is greeted by Rabbi Shmuel Plafker,
70, an Orthodox chaplain, who directs him to a
squat one-story building nearby. Inside, Dono-
frio, Plafker and a group of men don head-to-toe
protective gear, and Donofrio uses a power drill
to remove the 12 screws holding the lids onto
each of the two coffins. When the second lid is
removed , Donofrio leaves the men to the ritual.
None of the men left behind in the sterile, win-
dowless room had met Torron in life, none knew her
religious convictions, and none have mortuary train-
ing. They voluntarily undertake the ceremony pur-
suant to Jewish law. Torron’s corpse is stripped of
clothes and dressed in eight separate pieces of white
linen clothing, including a bonnet, shirt, pants, gown
and belt. She’s then placed back inside both coffins
and secured with the screws and carried out the
building feetfirst.
The men lift the coffin into the back of a flat-
bed truck and make the short walk to Torron’s
new burial plot, in Section 91 of the cemetery.
The small group passes mounds of dirt piled atop
freshly dug graves. They pass hundreds of tomb-
stones, including 22 victims of the 1911 Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory fire, Holocaust survivors and
Soviet Union refugees who sought asylum in the U.S.