Together Forever : Friends Who Jointly Picked Burial Plots Will Mark 40 Years in Club

Forty years ago, after leaving the tenements of Brooklyn for a better life in California, a close group of Jewish friends and family members planned for their final move: They bought burial plots together in Mt. Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

Jack Feuer, brothers Morris and Aaron Smith, Dave Lashinsky, Morris Antropol and their wives were young, they’d survived the Depression and World War II, and they wanted to have fun. The burial society became a club called the Amity Lodge.

Aaron Smith’s wife, Vivian, picked the name, “amity” meaning “friendship.” There were no funny-looking hats, no secret handshakes. The symbol of the club is a traditional handshake. There were plays--”The King of the Schnorrers,” “The Little Hanukkah Lamp”--monthly breakfasts cooked by the men, baseball games and trips to the opera, the orchestra and around the world.

Tonight, the club will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a dinner in Long Beach. Many members will not be there.

These days, “half of Amity is buried in Mt. Sinai,” said Aaron Smith, 81. “I accept this. I’ve reached the point where somebody goes regularly. This will happen to me more and more. When I was born, the doctor said, ‘He’s terminal.’ He just didn’t say when.”

Deadpan humor is a hallmark of the members, many of them survivors of pogroms, murderous Bolsheviks, rough steerage passages to New York, hungry days in the New World and the front lines of World War II.

Lashinsky and Aaron Smith were two of the original members, and their friendship symbolizes what the club is all about.

Their fathers escaped from the same tiny town of Tiraspol in Ukraine and brought their families out as soon as they could.

Aaron Smith was smuggled to Romania in 1921, when he was 4 years old. “I remember a little rowboat we were in on a river,” he said. “There was a light below me, and I was so excited. I thought it was a bakery.”

What the half-starved boy saw was the moonlight shining on the water. “It was the single greatest disappointment of my life,” Smith said.

From Romania the family made its way to Philadelphia, where an uncle lived. The family’s original name, Stihs, had been changed to Smith by an impatient Army sergeant who supervised the uncle.

When the hat shop where Smith’s father worked went on strike, he took the family to Brownsville in Brooklyn.

There, he reunited with a friend from home, Lashinsky’s father. They formed a men’s club, and David and Jacob Lashinsky and Aaron and Morris Smith became friends. They saw movies together, played stickball and hiked, New York City style.

“Going on a hike meant getting on the subway, 5 cents, and going out to Hollis Woods on Long Island with potatoes in our pockets,” Smith said, laughing.

Lashinsky moved to California as a young man and found good work at a janitorial services company. Within months, Smith, his wife and two kids, and his brother and his family piled into two ancient cars and headed for Long Beach.

“We were broke. We spent every penny we had to get to California,” Smith said.

Lashinsky put them up in his home for several months and found work for the men. He and Smith reveled in father-son baseball games, new homes in Long Beach and decades of Amity events.

Two weeks ago, Lashinsky died, after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for years.

On Saturday, Smith sat at his Huntington Beach dining room table wearing a shirt of his friend’s that Lashinsky’s widow mailed to him.

“People I love very much, I like to have a piece of them that I can touch,” he said. “Seventy-three years he was my friend.”

Smith was unable to attend the funeral because of his wife’s advanced Parkinson’s disease, and he might not be able to attend tonight’s dinner.

His son, Michael, and Lashinsky’s son live in nearby cities in Northern California, but Smith isn’t betting they’ll form a fraternal organization any time soon.

“A club? If they had a club, it would be to put on the steering wheels of their cars,” he said. “There’s not love like this anymore today between friends.”