BROOKFIELD – Charlotte Hirschfeld’s electric mobility scooter rolled down the ramp from her cemetery house and office, with her dog, Titus, in the front basket, his eyes peering forward like headlights for the voyage, the two of them using the transport for one of the last times at Mound Zion Cemetery.
She carried small flags with her as she zipped past one of the 9,000 burials here. “I put a red flag on if it gets red begonias, a white flag if it gets white begonias, a yellow flag if it’s miracles, and so on,” said the 79-year-old cemetery caretaker, interviewing in October. Typically, the staff role has been to follow behind her that day or the next day, placing the right flowers on the right graves.
Hirschfeld hardly ever looked at her list of graves – and corresponding flower choices – that she brought along as she and Titus went flag dropping. She served as caretaker here for 51 years. The list was in her head.
Hirschfeld died Nov 18, before her planned Dec. 31 retirement as caretaker of several Milwaukee-area cemeteries, including Mound Zion Cemetery, a Jewish cemetery established in 1878. Despite having a last name that could easily be Jewish, she was not, yet she became a beloved fixture in Jewish Wisconsin. When someone had a question at Mound Zion Cemetery, she was typically the face of it.
“I had one lady come one day to buy a grave, and this was several years ago, and I was still walking. She and I walked around for a good hour and a half, maybe even more,” Hirschfeld recalled in her October interview,
The woman said, “Charlotte, can I hug you?”
“Well, yeah, but what do you want to hug me for?”
“I just want to thank you. I’m dying of cancer, and you made this so easy for me to grieve for myself.”
Hirschfeld recalled that “after she died, her son came in and thanked me again because she used to talk about me how nice I was to her. I had no idea that she was sick and she was dying.”
“I’ve always been a person that was there for basically the underdog or the person that was going through something, my whole life, even when I was a kid,” Hirschfeld said. As Hirschfeld interviewed in the timeworn cemetery office, her sister Cheryl Holsten, who started working here four years ago to help an aging Hirschfeld, piped up from the other end: “You always help everybody!”
On the Jewish community, Hirschfeld said, “There’s an awful lot of generous people in that community, a lot of caring people; I would say the majority of them, they don’t care what religion you are.”
A long haul
Hirschfeld and her staff of several people handled “anything that had to do with the outside, whether it was digging a grave, doing a foundation, planting flowers, weeding perpetual care graves,” she said. It’s all paid for with perpetual care funds.
When Hirschfeld got COVID-19 last year, it “hit” her kidneys and she wound up on dialysis, she said. “I wanted to stay here until I was 80, but it just wasn’t working out,” she said. “I feel guilty because I have to be gone three days a week, even though my sister is here.”
She said she would have liked the idea of staying until 80 because it’s a nice, round number – eight and zero. “I’m just so attached to everybody that it feels like I’m losing part of my family,” she said.
Her sister, Holsten, said she was retiring simultaneously after four years here. “I wanted to retire a while ago, but she needed some help,” Holsten said.
Hirschfeld and her husband Ernest started out as caretakers together 51 years ago, after his father had been in the role, and the profession has been passed around from there. Among caretakers for Jewish Milwaukee cemeteries, she said, “most of them are Hirschfelds.”
Ernest died in 2004. She has lived on the grounds ever since she started and was to make a big move – to a house she purchased in Greenfield. The laughter and good-natured jokes that have filled the cemetery house and office here are part of her legacy.
“When you were 28 –years old, when you came in, all of a sudden you’re 79 – it’s a lot different,” she said with a laugh.
It’s the end of an era. Hirschfeld has been meeting people at some of their hardest moments for decades. “There’s even ladies I used to go to lunch with once in a while,” Hirschfeld said. Some left her gifts in their wills.
She added: “Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger than it is to talk to somebody in your own family.”
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Charlotte Hirschfeld died Nov. 18; funeral service, Krause Funeral Home, was Nov. 26. Burial at Good Hope Cemetery, Greenfield.
* * *
This was her goodbye
Charlotte Hirschfeld contacted the Chronicle to say goodbye to the community, before her planned retirement at the end of this year. We met with her in October and are running this story on her as planned, almost completely unchanged. May her memory be a blessing.
* * *
Flowers on graves?
Although Jewish custom traditionally favors placing stones on graves as a sign of remembrance, some families today choose flowers, and caretakers often honor those preferences.
Loading ...