After Camper Dies in Alaska Wilderness, Chabad Comforts Friends and Family
by Karen Schwartz – chabad.org
Sixteen-year-old Simon Mirkes from Farmington Hills, Mich., was on a summer camp trip in the Alaskan wilderness when he collapsed and died this week near the Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. With help from Chabad-Lubavitch of Alaska, his fellow campers and their families back home have been trying to cope with the tragedy.
Having assisted groups from Tamarack Camps and other summer camps for decades, Rabbi Yosef and Esther Greenberg, co-directors of the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish Center of Alaska, worked with the Mirkes family in Detroit and a funeral home in Alaska to coordinate the boy’s return home, and provided the shocked campers with food, lodging and comfort after they traveled three hours by bus to Anchorage. When the campers arrived, they were met with a warm meal and social workers from the Jewish community who spoke with them until late into the night.
Rabbi Greenberg and associate Rabbi Levi Glitsenstein conducted a service for the teens in Mirkes’s memory. Girls lit candles and boys put on tefillin. “We all said kaddish for him,” Greenberg told Chabad.org. “They were all talking about him, it was very hard. We were there until 1:30 in the morning and the kids went to sleep.” The campers stayed on the Chabad’s campus overnight and by Tuesday afternoon, more Tamarack camp staff, along with a social worker, had arrived to take them home.
Rabbi Greenberg arranged a funeral procession from the local synagogue to the airport, where members of the local Jewish community were joined on Zoom by the Mirkes family and members of Detroit’s Jewish community. “The Jewish community was with him until they took him to the plane,” the rabbi said.
Messages of Support and Thanks
In Michigan, parents, rabbis and community leaders exchanged messages of support and appreciation. “Our community is incredibly grateful for the warm and caring hospitality Chabad offered, an act of chesed [kindness] which made all the difference to the campers and staff during an extraordinarily difficult and painful time,” wrote Steven Ingber, Chief Executive Officer of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. “Rabbi Greenberg and his staff were absolutely wonderful and provided great comfort not only to the trip participants, but to their families and loved ones as well. We are so thankful.”
Greenberg spoke of Chabad’s responsibility to Jews wherever they may be. “Chabad today is literally a home for every Jew, wherever he finds himself, in any situation,” said Greenberg, adding that the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, had always championed the idea that Jews should feel like one people, one nation, and should all be there for each other. “The Rebbe created a network of emissaries in the world that are now in every city, in every town. No matter how far you’ll be, there’ll be an emissary there to help you.”
