It says in the Torah that you shall not “place a stumbling block before the blind (Leviticus 19:14) In Jewish tradition, the Kohanim are not allowed to have contact with the dead as to not become impure. Historically, the purpose of marking graves is so that Kohanim should not become imbued with corpse impurity by inadvertently stepping or bending over a grave. This is everyone’s responsibility. The mitzvah is to raise a pile of rocks over the grave. Every person who walks by helps maintain the marker by replacing or adding rocks, so the marker is stable across time. Eventually someone thought of adding a big rock with the personal information of the deceased. A further idea proposed cementing the rocks together which made the whole marker much more solid. Today you have the common monument and headstone you see in cemeteries. Maintaining grave markers is considered a mitzvah and adding a rock is the way that mitzvah is done.
On June 10th 1942, my great aunts Elisabeth Betty Leopold (age 49 – my age!), Jetchen Leopold (age 57) and my great grandparents Freida Trief (age 59) and Karl Trief (age 54) were deported from Wiesbaden, Germany. The transport reached Lublin on June 13th, and from there headed to a death camp in the eastern part of Poland called Sobibor. It is widely assumed that the prisoners were gassed by carbon monoxide hours after their arrival and thrown into mass graves.
Today I visited those graves. My ancestors had no funeral, no proper burial, no one to say Kaddish for them, no one to light a Yartzeit candle, no one to mourn their departure. My visit to Sobibor allowed me to belatedly honor my relatives. I had a guide and learned what I could about their final hours. I said Kaddish, lit a candle and lay a stone on the monument marking their passing. I cried on their mass grave. I hope that I had some part in elevating and bringing peace to their souls.
Mitzvot Anecdotes 