‘This weekend should have been our son’s barmitzvah – we’ll still mark his coming of age’
Joshua Jacobs and Kitty Doerfler didn’t live long enough to have a barmitzvah or a batmitzvah but their parents still chose to commemorate the occasions
Louisa Walters is Features Editor at the Jewish News and specialises in food and travel writing
Next weekend it would have been Joshua Jacobs’ barmitzvah. Yet it will be his father Marc leyning his portion in shul, because on 3 December 2010 Joshua was stillborn. His mother Nikki was almost 38 weeks pregnant when her waters broke but when she got to hospital they discovered that there was no heartbeat.
The Jacobs went on to have three more boys – Mason (12), Blake (10) and Ryder (5) – and Joshua is very much part of the family. “He is subtly in every room in the house,” says Nikki. “There is something of his or a picture of us holding hands or something that represents him.
“I wanted him to never be forgotten. Every year we mark his birthday with a family tea and on his 10th birthday Marc and I ran a half marathon, and our son Mason (nine at the time) did a 10k bike ride, all to raise money for charity. We’ve had this weekend looming knowing it would have been his barmitzvah and we decided that it is still ‘our’ weekend and it should be marked.”
Marc decided that he wanted to leyn Joshua’s portion and in the evening, the couple are hosting a charity casino evening to raise money for Sands, a stillborn and neonatal charity which helped them in the early days. The goal is to raise £13,000 in honour of Joshua’s 13th birthday.
Marc will be reading Maftir and Haftorah at Borehamwood shul. “I haven’t done this since I was 13, so it has been a little stressful trying to remember everything – the different vowels and the scales,” he says. “I’m really nervous because if I don’t do it right I’m letting Joshua down.”
Nikki and Marc have been overwhelmed by the generous response to their plans. They have sold almost 100 tickets to the casino evening and have been donated incredible raffle prizes. Emma Miller has given them the function space at Rowley Lane and Paul Zimbler at Me Love Events is arranging the casino themed event. “We feel really grateful that we’re surrounded by so much love. I don’t know if we’ll be emotional over the weekend because of what it’s not, or should we just be thankful for what it is?” says Nikki.
“The boys are excited and I think they’re proud of us. I hear of families pulled apart by losing a child but I feel like Joshua brought our family closer together.”
Nikki says that stillbirth is a taboo subject which is not openly talked about. “People don’t know what to say. At the time, we became that couple who had just lost their baby and we totally lost our identity.”
Nikki and Marc go to Joshua’s grave every year and to sit with him and read from the book that Nikki wrote when he died. “I just wrote everything down. It was a way to get it out. It’s a book to help us remember the journey we’ve been on.”
Sarah and Ian Doerfler’s daughter Kitty was born in Leeds on 5 January 2006. Sarah started noticing little bruise-like blue marks on her skin which at first were dismissed by the doctors but when she was two weeks old she was diagnosed with a congenital form of leukaemia. “Because it was such a rare type, even though Leeds is a centre of excellence for children’s haematology and oncology the doctors were a bit stumped, because they had never seen a baby as young as that with this type,” says Sarah. “We were told we could just let her be in which case she would only last a couple of weeks or we could try treatment, even though there wasn’t a treatment protocol for such a young baby.”
They decided to try and for the next four months they essentially lived in hospital. Then when Kitty was nine months old she relapsed and the family were told there was nothing more that could be done. “Kitty was put on active palliative care and every step of the way, she blew everyone away by lasting longer than expected,” says Sarah. “She died when she was 15 months old, but we do feel that we were given 15 months we never would have had if she hadn’t had the treatment”.
The Doerflers have two other children – Max, 20 and Libi, 13.
“Kitty’s first birthday was the only birthday that she ever had. We held a party for her but we asked people for donations to charity instead of giving her a present. After her death we continued to mark her birthday in different ways. One year we went to her grave, and there had been a heavy snowfall and Max decided he wanted to build a snowman for his sister. The cemetery is right by the motorway and a few people called in to the local radio station to remark that they’d seen a snowman in the cemetery!”
In 2018, when it would have been Kitty’s batmitzvah, Sarah and Ian wanted to commemorate the occasion and to raise money for two charities that had supported them – Jewish Welfare Board and Martin House Children’s Hospice. “We organised a huge cross-communal challah bake at our shul (United Hebrew Congregation) and it was just amazing. We hosted a big reception while the dough was rising where we did a raffle. And the thing that I loved the most was a mitzvah auction where people had to pledge a mitzvah in Kitty’s name.” They also had a tea for family and friends and asked for donations to charity. In total they raised £8,000 in Kitty’s memory.
Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers at Hendon Reform leads group services for those who have lost children stillborn or older and accompanies women to the mikvah to process and mourn miscarriage. “There are fantastic resources in our tradition, but sometimes we need an expert to help us find them,” she says.
Debbie sees whole families coming together to memorial services. “It’s a family ritual through which they can all pull the memory of this child and process the loss together and not pretend that it didn’t happen.”
Painting a stone to put on a grave has become a popular ritual. “This is a way to personalise a tribute to a child and it gives the mourner a sense of ownership and that they are not just going through the motions,” says Debbie. ”People lose babies and just don’t know what to do. So turning to people who do is a blessing. There was a time that there were no mourning rights for babies born under 30 days old – in some cases families didn’t even know where they were buried.
To donate to the Jacobs family fundraiser click here.
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