Based on Genesis 47:29, ensuring the proper care for and burial of the dead is known in the rabbinic tradition as the “kindness of truth” (ḥesed shel emet), since one cannot expect to receive anything in return, even a gesture thanks, from the deceased. The organization Chesed Shel Emes—which takes its name from the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the phrase—provides ritual purification and burial for Jewish dead without means or without synagogue affiliations. In a photo essay, Mark Abramson shows how COVID-19 has affected the group’s mission. Isadora Kosofsky writes:

Their work focuses primarily on the forgotten and the anonymous. With contacts in the death bureaucracy of New York and the surrounding areas, Chesed Shel Emes identifies Jews bound for potter’s fields and claims them instead for their cemetery in upstate New York. The group is often on scene after suicides or accidents and at hospitals for patients who have just died. Chesed Shel Emes operates through WhatsApp and with a Ford pickup converted into a hearse.

As COVID-19 hit New York last spring, the virus claimed the lives of hundreds of Orthodox Jews. Families feared their loved ones would be cremated instead of buried. They read false social-media messages warning that their deceased relatives might not get proper taharot, or ceremonial baths. They dreaded the possibility that their parent or sibling would be left indefinitely in a temporary morgue truck.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.