Cemetery Histories and Mysteries

TI CEMETERY’S HISTORIES, MYSTERIES

By Ellen Steinbaum

The Temple Israel Cemetery in Wakefield is the resting place of many whose stories are well known in the history of Boston’s Jewish community. There are also mysteries, markers that leave questions and wishes to know more. One of those marks a single grave in a picturesque lakeside corner that reads simply:

Oppenheim-Errera Stephane July 6, 1916 - Dec. 4, 1942

Seymour Small, who chairs the Cemetery Committee, has found himself drawn to the history of the Cemetery and those memorialized there. He was intrigued. He found that Stephane was one of the 492 who died in the Cocoanut Grove Fire.

How did Stephane come to be buried at the TI Cemetery? His parents, Paul Oppenheim and Gabrielle Oppenheim-Errera, who emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1933 and settled in Princeton, were not Temple Israel members. Nor was his older brother, Felix, who became a political science professor at UMass Amherst. Gabrielle purchased the grave and it is possible TI members numbered among Paul and Gabrielle’s wide circle of friends. One close friend was Albert Einstein with whom Paul, a philosopher, shared regular Sunday morning walks. Another recalls the living room of their home painted in shades of pink and light blue to echo the Monet painting of London Bridge hanging there. But any TI connection remains unknown.

What brought Stephane to Boston and to the Cocoanut Grove on November 28, 1942? He lived in Newark, New Jersey. Maybe he was visiting a friend. He probably died at Boston City Hospital. One other victim of the fire, 22-year-old Shirley Lubell, a TI member, is buried at the Cemetery.

We can imagine that Stephane’s parents spent the six days before his death desperate to save him. We do know they asked a New York doctor, George Zuelzer, to send a vial of Eutonon, a heart and blood vessel medicine he had developed, in hopes that it could help. By the time the vial arrived, Stephane had died. Later Gabrielle would say that Stephane’s death by fire had felt to her as if he had been lost to the ovens of a Nazi concentration camp.

All other details of Stephane’s story are hidden from us. Paul, Gabrielle, and Felix all lived into their 90s. George Zuelzer’s son, Wolf, became the director of the NIH’s division of blood resources. Felix’s widow, Shulamith, is a writer whose work includes children’s books on Einstein and on the Holocaust.

The Temple Israel Cemetery in Wakefield preserves more than 160 years of the rich history of the congregation and of Boston's Jewish community in a lakeside setting of dignity and natural beauty. For information on available burial plots, please contact Sue Misselbeck at 617-566-3960 or susanm@tisrael.org.