Every weekend, a Russian family restores abandoned graves, cleaning headstones and placing flowers for those no one else remembers. For Grandma Lida, it’ is a way of keeping memories of the deceased alive. According to her grandson, their videos have inspired others in Russia and abroad to care for abandoned graves near their loved ones. Story by Ava Luquet. Keywords for this article Source link
(RNS) — The doors to St. Andrew’s Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which open at 7:30 a.m. on weekdays, opened to a crowd that had been gathering since 6 a.m. in the autumn chill. They were there for a hot breakfast. I was at the church with my daughter, Anna, a fourth-year medical student, one of a team of three volunteers with Wolverine Street Medicine, a favorite extracurricular activity of University of Michigan medical students. Today they were providing foot care in a makeshift clinic they had set up behind a screen in the church’s vestibule. We had to unpack the trunk of Anna’s car. First was the collapsible green cart that we unfolded and stocked with gauze, Band-Aids, anti-fungal lotions and then the instruments she picked up from the autoclave at the medical school. Watching her organize these supplies was among the many moments of “radical amazement” happening that morning, a term first coined by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man,” Heschel wrote in his …
