By: Serach Nissim
A daughter is suing a Jewish funeral home for mixing up her mother’s burial.
On October 5, 2020 Janet Kay passed away at the age of 82 after suffering a long illness. Her daughter, Robin Kay Lord, is now suing the funeral home at Bloomfield-Cooper Jewish Chapels located in Ocean Township, New Jersey, for the traumatizing mix up.
As reported by the DailyMail.com, Mrs. Lord is alleging that her mother was buried in the wrong cemetery plot, near a male stranger, and in another woman’s clothing. The shocking discovery was made back in 2020, during the services, which she says left the mourners horrified. The suit accuses Bloomfield-Cooper Jewish Chapels of delaying the service at Mount Sinai cemetery in Morganville and then finally revealing the mix-up in front of sixty attendees—one of whom was in her 90’s and almost fainted.
“Bloomfield-Cooper Jewish Chapels traumatized my entire family with their gross mishandling of my mother’s remains,” Lord told The Trentonian, who first reported the lawsuit, which was filed last week. “The disrespect with which they treated my mother was unconscionable. No family should ever endure that.” The funeral home held the funeral two days late, and they ‘lost’ her mothers body– the services commenced without the body present. Her mother’s body was later found at the wrong cemetery in North Jersey, wearing someone else’s clothes and a different woman’s wedding band.
Lord says she waited till now to bring the lawsuit because she was hoping the funeral home would make things right. Instead, she says all the family’s requests fell on deaf ears. “We tried many times to have reasonable discussions with them but they would never respond,” she said. Lord added that the one time when their lawyer did succeed in getting someone at the chapel to respond, they had said: ‘We paid for a luncheon … now what else do you want us to do?’ That was the final blow for Lord, who then decided to file a civil suit against the chapel. Lord, who is a criminal defense attorney in New Jersey, says that the jury will decide how much money will be owed in the case. She added that she hopes the case can be settled in a timely fashion. ‘I want them to be accountable so another family doesn’t have to go through this,’ she told DailyMail.com. “It is intolerable. It is recklessness and a total disregard for the dead,” Lord said.
Bloomfield-Cooper Jewish Funeral Chapel in Manalapan, New Jersey, is a member of the Dignity Memorial® network of funeral and cemetery service providers. As per its website, all of its services are ‘designed to help you through one of the most personal and challenging stages of life.’ “We are dedicated to working with you one-on-one to plan your loved one’s memorial in accordance with the funeral and burial customs that are important to you,” the website reads. The funeral chapel did not return a request for comment from DailyMail.com.
