Finding support after pregnancy loss
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Finding support after pregnancy loss

Reva Judas’s NechamaComfort offers smart, comprehensive, loving care

Reva Judas is presenting information at the Jewish Women’s Health Conference in Westchester.
Reva Judas is presenting information at the Jewish Women’s Health Conference in Westchester.

It’s hard to think about death.

Any death.

Death might be a part of life, but to belabor the obvious, it’s not the part we want to think about. It’s the part we’d like to gloss over, skate over, glaze over. Of course we can’t.

But it’s one thing to think about the death of someone who’s had a long life, with relationships and accomplishments. With a narrative. It’s usually very painful, but there are stories, and memories of joy.

It’s another to think about a miscarriage or a stillbirth or the death of a baby who hasn’t made it to a first birthday. There are very few memories. It’s mainly truncated dreams and unfulfilled, unfulfillable hopes.

Until very recently, Jewish tradition — and here, Jewish tradition happens to conform closely to general American custom — is to forget about such deaths. Babies would be left unnamed, buried in unmarked graves, and their parents would be told not to mourn them formally — no kaddish or shiva or yahrzeit — but to move on. To have more children. To forget.

But it doesn’t work that way, as Reva Judas of Teaneck, the founder and CEO of NechamaComfort knows, both from personal experience and from years of working with women and families. Grief doesn’t just go away if it’s not acknowledged; when it’s shoved under the psychological equivalent of a rug, it just lies there. It’s organic, so it festers.

Reva — let’s call her that, rather than Ms. Judas, because formality doesn’t work here — is married to Daniel Judas; nearly 40 years ago, in 1986, their first baby, Pesach, died just hours after he was born. It was a nightmare that they and their parents had to muddle through on their own. Even though Reva’s father, Sidney Green, an Orthodox rabbi, and her mother, Margie Vinick Green, a very involved rebbetzin, had helped to support people in Reva and Danny’s position, there was no guidebook on how to do it. There were just rules on what not to do.

For example, no shiva, and none of the comfort that flows from that complicated, wise institution.

Grieving parents often were told not to name their dead babies, out of the kindhearted but mistaken idea that if mourning did not have a name on which to land, it would just disperse. Somehow. When newborns died, rabbis often would name the babies themselves; they’d give them outlandish names, so they wouldn’t hear them. No Avis or Rachels or Shiras; instead, “I remember a woman telling me that they had a baby who died many years ago, and a rabbi named him Hamor. Donkey.”

Parents also weren’t told where their babies were buried. “My grandparents lost a baby who lived for just 28 hours. In 1942,” Reva said. “They never knew where the baby was buried. Every year, we would go to the cemetery and look, but there were no records.

“My grandmother, who died at 82, never stopped looking.”

Reva Judas, second from right, is in Chicago earlier this year; she stands with members of the Pregnancy Loss and Infant Death Alliance.

That has changed, Reva said; by now, the only local Jewish cemetery that buries babies in unmarked graves and does not give any information to grieving families is in Lakewood.

So when Reva wanted to know how to help bereaved mothers and their families, she had to figure it out for herself, based on her own intuition and the kindness, warm hearts, and experience of others.

Over the last quarter-century, Reva has worked with women and their families who have suffered the loss of a pregnancy, fetus, or newborn. She’s worked as a grief counselor and a hospital chaplain, and she began NechamaComfort, which became a standalone nonprofit in 2019. (Nechama is the Hebrew word for comfort; the organization’s name combines the two words because another group already used Nechama.)

NechamaComfort’s reach is international, but its headquarters are local, in Teaneck, and Reva has spoken and taught in both North Jersey and MetroWest.

October was Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. That’s an international designation; President Ronald Reagan officially proclaimed it in the United States in 1988. “But nobody really knew about it,” Reva said. When she first began to work with support groups, “in October we would have a walk, or we’d plant trees. Some of the trees that we planted at Holy Name in Teaneck are still there.” But those programs ran out of money, and the pandemic killed whatever was left. “Nobody does anything big anymore,” Reva said.

October is over, but because the chaggim and October 7 made observing that month with any kind of programming difficult, and because, to compound the situation, October also is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, NechamaComfort is stretching it into November.

The Israeli government managed to mark the month last October, though. On Tuesday, the last day of the month, a program in the Knesset “acknowledged Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month,” Reva said. That program was organized by “a few organizations, and NechamaComfort is one of them. We premiered a short, animated film at the Knesset describing pregnancy and infant loss. Two of our case managers — one who is visiting Israel, and one who lives there — represented us.

NechamaComfort is planning online interviews to mark the month. They’ll be posted on the group’s Instagram, its YouTube, and its website, www.nechamacomfort.org.

“We will interview Sherry Bensimon of New City, the codirector at Gutterman Musicant in Hackensack,” she said. “She’s the first female shomer Shabbat funeral director there. We’ve been working together on the burials.”

“Since September 8, we’ve had eight burials,” she continued. That’s a lot — why so many? “I think because more people know about us,” she said. “Some of them were 12-week losses. And we had three from the New York area, because rabbis from New York call us because they know that we do it with dignity.

“It is so important to do it with dignity, with love, and with care. If we can, we use a hearse. I will sing the Shema, and HaMalach HaGoel.

“I think that there are more burials now because people want to deal with it.”

Those burials are free; a now-defunct burial society donated its plots, and both Gutterman and a cemetery, Cedar Park, donate its services.

Another interview will be with Duba Shiff of Fair Lawn, who wrote a book, “A Strange Thing Happened,” that came out just last week. “It’s a story of pregnancy loss for siblings,” Reva said.

There are some books for children on the subject, but most of them are Christian, “which is fine, but I don’t like them because they all have happy endings,” Reva said. There are some Jewish books, and they too, have happy endings, along the lines of “HaShem will bring a baby.” But real life doesn’t always offer such endings. “We can’t know that,” Reba said.

“The last sentence in Duba’s book is ‘I don’t know what will happen next, but I know that I have my family, and we will get through it together.’”

Reva plans to interview two awareness ambassadors, Sar Leben of Teaneck and Avital Borin, who lives in Florida but wants to create an awareness program in Bergen County, this spring.

To maintain NechamaComfort and fund its growth, the group is launching a fundraising campaign. “We’re at a crucial point,” Reva said. “We need funding. Everybody is giving money to Israel now. That’s amazing and it’s important. Israel needs it. But the fact that we were at the Knesset, even in the middle of a war, means that families are suffering.”

In the United States, the fallout from the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade with its Dobbs decision, returning abortion regulations to the states, has increased the public’s awareness of how many women and families suffer from pregnancy loss, stillbirth, and infant death.

“Without getting political, I think that it is important that women have the right to have the procedures they need,” Reva said. She’s talking about abortions, including late-term ones, that are done because the fetus cannot survive outside the womb, or because the mother’s life or health is at risk if the pregnancy were to continue.

“I have had cases where women are in states that don’t permit it, and they have to travel to get their procedures. I’m talking to someone who is in discomfort. Who is having cramps. Who is having a miscarriage. But she has to fly to somewhere else — if she has money to fly, if someone can take care of her kids, if she’s not in such discomfort that she can’t fly — to have the procedure that she needs.

“It is very emotional. She might be 12 or 15 weeks pregnant, or she might not even know that she’s pregnant. She’s stuck.

“So many times now I’ve had cases where women have to go to another state. It’s so difficult.

“I am so mad. All the rabbis are on board. Everybody is giving permission to have a termination for medical reasons” — halachically, an abortion to save a women’s life or health is not only acceptable, it can be mandated — “but now some politicians are lumping Jews in with Christians.

“I got so many rabbis on board, and now it is so horrific.

“I had a client who had to go to Maryland for a procedure. It was Purim. She was so emotional, and she was obsessed with hearing the megillah read. So I put it together, and we got her the megillah reading.” And the medical care that she needed, and the emotional care to go along with it.

It is becoming more difficult to get obstetric care even in New Jersey, Reva added. “One of the big practices in Englewood stopped doing obstetrics. It’s only doing gynecology.”

Why? “Insurance,” she said. “Even here, it affects us.”

Infertility is another big problem, an emotional issue that often puts women in a position where they need help from NechamaComfort.

Reva wishes that people would be more sensitive to issues surrounding infertility, pregnancy, and pregnancy loss. For example, if you see someone you think might be pregnant, don’t ask. If the outlook is good, and it’s someone you’re close to, you’ll hear soon enough. If not, the question will cause nothing but pain.

Reva hears from many women from around the country and in Israel, she said.

Because the need continues, “we have to keep raising awareness. And we need funding.

“We will be launching a campaign with our awareness officers.”

NechamaComfort also is launching a virtual memory garden, which will remain online. That’s likely to happen in the next few months, Reva said.

And then there’s the issue of self-care, which also matters, she said. Knowing that you look good can help you feel good. To that end, NechamaComfort is sponsoring a boutique at a local home on Monday, November 4, at 8:30 p.m. Email her at revajudas@gmail.com to learn more.

NechamaComfort is online at nechamacomfort.org. Its Instagram is nechamacomfort, and so is its YouTube channel and Facebook page.

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