Gerry Berkal (1933-2025)
Our cousin Gerry died this Shabbat, in the home she shared with her daughter Susie. My brother bore the news of her death, catching me on my way to the synagogue. I always thought I would be the point of connection for births and deaths and everything in between, but at some point Todd stepped into the role. He reminded me to call David, Gerry’s son, and convey our love to both of his siblings. He turns out to be more familial than I am, even though I am officially older.
Gerry was also deeply familial. As the youngest child of my grandmother’s youngest sister, she should by rights have been a marginal player, a second-tier actor in the Borkofsky drama. My own grandmother, Bertha, was an unhappy titan, who wielded more power than her sisters combined. But Gerry was almost impossibly adorable. She looks toward the camera in all the family photos like an irresistible pixie, dark and elfin, a gamine in the mold of Audrey Hepburn. No one apparently could resist her attractions, least of all the indomitable Bertha, who loved her like the daughter she never had. My mother, who never evoked her mother-in-law’s love, also became a Gerry fan girl. She regularly noted Gerry’s status, but did not seem to take it to heart. Among the Borkofskys, Gerry was immune to jealousy.
The result is that she was an improbable matriarch. In the middle years from the 70s forward, her home in the suburbs was the Mother Ship of our family. I remember going there on Sunday evenings, a handful of Passovers, and Thanksgiving dinners. Gerry and Tzvi Berkal, her great bear of a husband, presided with a kind of easeful grace. They had a very high threshold for the tumult of family and set a long and joyful table for the rest of us. We had exactly the same meal each time we went: kosher London Broil and Tzvi Berkal’s coleslaw. They both had spent time on kibbutz in Israel and loved the informal noise of community. When their son Steven married, and he asked me to officiate, Gerry had only one request, that I blow off the silly formalities of the synagogue, and somehow turn the young couple into barefoot kibbutzniks. I tried (and failed), but I knew what she wanted.
I wish, in retrospect, that I had tried still harder. Like many members of the Borkofsky family, Gerry and Tzvi were Jewish public servants. He worked for a synagogue, she for Israel Bonds, the fundraising organization inspired by Ben Gurion. They both knew the language of Jewish life, and modeled a deeply attractive Jewish adulthood. There were others in the family who did similar work, but the Berkals somehow brought together more strands of Jewishness: institutional, cultural, political, and religious. By the time I understood what they stood far, I was heading in the same direction: a life of Jewish service and kosher London Broil. Much like my parents, they were interested in my rabbinate. In a family marked by a strain of dismissiveness, it helped to have them in my corner.
And Gerry stayed in my corner deep into our lives. When we returned to Detroit to bury my father, Gerry opened her china cabinet to pull out a gift. It was time, she said, to hand over a matza cover, used as a centerpiece on the Passover table, the partner of the seder plate that occupies center stage. This one was a carousel of satin and sequins, embroidered by Bertha Fitzerman in 1918. It was the ritual equivalent of a county fair. I had never seen anything quite like this matza cover: charming, personal, garish, and optimistic, made as the world was coming out of war. Bertha gave it to Gerry instead of her sons, simply because she liked Gerry best. And now Gerry Berkal gave it to me.
I will think of my grandmother and Gerry together when we sit down to seder in April of next year. It’s been a long time since I’ve celebrated Passover with Gerry, but the sequins on the matza cover will reflect her light. May the memory of the righteous be for a blessing.