By Daniel Levisohn, Assistant Editor, JTNews
Nearly one year ago, outside a storefront in St. Louis, Missouri, Bob Ross could not have foreseen that one day soon he would be dancing.
On that day, two men sat in a rented car in a parking lot — Ross frantically looking for help from a state trooper while his brother Bruce sat in the passenger seat, having just suffered a massive heart attack. They were far from home, and Bob was sure that Bruce was dying.
This was not how things were supposed to happen. At least that’s how it must have seemed to Ross at the time.
The plan had been simple: Weeks earlier, just short of the High Holiday season, Bob Ross had decided to learn more about the death of his grandfather, Nathan Pechersky. Growing up, he had only ever heard scattered details about the Russian immigrant who had come to the United States to work as a carpenter, until he died in 1917, at the young age of 49. Pechersky had left behind two daughters: one aged 17, the other, Bob and Bruce’s mother, was 7 years old.
“I asked about my grandfather, and my mother always told me that we were so poor that he must have been buried in a pauper’s cemetery in St. Louis,” recalls Ross. “It blew my mind that no one visited him, [that] no one saw him. He was lost.”
Ross was haunted by thoughts of his grandfather’s lonely end throughout his life. Then, in his 50s, Ross began to change. He started to explore his Judaism, which had until then figured only peripherally in his life.
He eventually discovered the West Seattle Torah Center, an outreach organization run by Orthodox rabbis that had formed a small minyan on California Ave. a few years earlier. It attracted Jews like Ross who had drifted far away from Judaism, but had, for whatever reason, stumbled back into it.
Ross began to attend services on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. It was a time of flux in his life. He had suffered a heart attack. His marriage was ending. He made a visit to Israel. Then, one day, while listening to a dvar Torah from the Torah Center’s rabbi, Ephraim Schwartz, he made a decision: he would try to find his grandfather’s grave.
After looking into it a bit on his own, he consulted Schwartz and together they found the name of the Jewish cemetery outside St. Louis: Chesed Shel Emeth.
He then looked the cemetery up online, and, to his great surprise, found a listing of his grandfather’s grave and the date of his death. Coincidentally, the grandfather’s 89th yahrtzeit was just a few weeks away:Oct. 12, 2006 — shortly after Yom Kippur — Schwartz told him.
Ross then contacted Bruce, who lived in Denver. Like Bob, Bruce was also exploring his Judaism for the first time. The pair decided to fly out to St. Louis, drive to the cemetery, and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish at their grandfather’s graveside at the time of his yahrtzeit.
They met up in St. Louis on Oct. 11. Bruce had packed the siddur and tallit he had received on his Bar Mitzvah. They drove to the cemetery, but found the gates locked. They had no choice but to return the next day. They found a kosher restaurant, where they ate, and then they prayed together at a congregation in St. Louis.
The next morning, when the brothers had planned to drive to the cemetery, Bruce overslept. He woke up feeling ill, but told Bob he felt well enough to go anyway. When they got to the lobby of the hotel, it was clear to Bob something was wrong. He put Bruce in the car and headed for the hospital.
On the way, Bruce’s body began to convulse. Bob pulled over at a gas station and waited for an ambulance. At the hospital, doctors pronounced Bruce dead at 9:52 a.m.
Bob contacted Rabbi Schwartz, who was in Atlanta for a family reunion. On the night of Oct. 12, Schwartz flew to St. Louis to support Bob and assist with the funeral arrangements.
After a discussion with the family, they decided to bury Bruce in St. Louis. To Bob’s surprise, they located one of the few remaining plots of land in the Chesed Shel Emeth cemetery, a spot just 50 feet from where Nathan Pechersky had been buried almost exactly 89 years before. After securing permission from Bruce’s family, they buried him with his Bar Mitzvah siddur draped in his tallit.
After the funeral, Ross recounts, he wandered over to his grandfather’s grave. On the gravestone he observed that the date of death was erev Yom Kippur, which meant that Schwartz had incorrectly dated the day of the yahrtzeit to be several weeks later. In fact, the brothers should have come to St. Louis on Oct. 1 — erev Yom Kippur — if they had wanted to observe the yahrtzeit.
“Hashem preordained this moment for my brother to die,” says Ross.
Looking back, he sees divine action, and accidents piled upon accidents that converged upon his brother to allow him to spend the last days of his life surrounded by Jews, eating kosher food, wearing a tallit and ultimately receiving a kosher burial, all of which, he says, would not otherwise have happened.
There was the incorrectly dated yahrtzeit, which, if dated correctly, would have precluded the brother’s traveling to St. Louis because of Yom Kippur. Ross says his brother would have likely died in Denver.
Then there was the coincidence that the rabbi was in Atlanta and able to fly quickly to assist Ross with the burial, not to mention that the burial plot was located just 50 feet away from Pechersky’s, and had been available for his grandchild.
And then there was also the fact, discovered by Ross a week after he had returned home from his brother’s funeral, that Nathan had been born on erev Yom Kippur and that he therefore had died on his birthday.
“There are more things I don’t know about Judaism than I know about Judaism,” says Ross, as a way of pointing to his faith for explanation. “There are too many coincidences.”
Back at home, Ross was nervous about his own legacy — the fact that he had no Jewish children bothered him. So Rabbi Schwartz suggested that Bob consider sponsoring a sefer Torah for the West Seattle Torah Center. For several years the minyan had been borrowing their Torah, and Schwartz believed that they would need one to grow. With money he had collected from the sale of his house, Ross commissioned the Torah for the congregation in March of 2007.
In early September, he wrote the final letters of the Torah at a ceremony in New York City. On Sun., Sept. 30, members of the West Seattle Torah Center, the Seattle Kollel, and a group of friends and family gathered in West Seattle for the Torah’s dedication ceremony.
After reading a selection of Torah that likened Bruce’s death to the way that God had prepared Moses for his death, the assembled group raised tarps and prayer shawls and danced around the block. At the center of the group, Bob Ross held the Torah. Stitched onto its cover are the words: “The Ross-Pechersky Sefer Torah.”
“Even if you learn a little bit of Torah, it’s better than no Torah,” says Ross. “I don’t intend to be a Torah scholar. The enormity is breathtaking. I can study 20 hours a day and [not] comprehend everything. Maybe this story, the purpose, is to bring Jews, like myself, baal teshuvah, to bring them back…. I think the story was not just for me. I think the focal point is Jews who are returning.”