http://www.forward.com/articles/126988/By Josh Nathan-Kazis
Published March 31, 2010, issue of April 09, 2010.
On the morning of the 99th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Esther Malka Boyarin is sweeping trash off the stoop of the Stanton Street Shul, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
![](http://www.forward.com/workspace/assets/images/articles/Stanton-Street-Chalking-040110.jpg)
In Memory: Esther Malka Boyarin memorializes a Triangle fire victim in front of the Stanton Street Shul.
Boyarin is not the janitor — she’s a synagogue board member. But such distinctions are blurred at the synagogue, one of the poorest of the few remaining in the neighborhood whose storied streets once teemed with newly arrived Eastern European Jews.
The stoop clean, Boyarin kneels on the sidewalk with a few pieces of chalk and deliberately writes a name, an age and an address using different colored sticks:
Louis Rosen, 33, 174 Attorney Street.
As the synagogue’s rabbi and a few onlookers stand by, Boyarin adds another phrase: “We Remember.” Finally, someone lights a yahrzeit candle atop the temporary shrine.
Rosen was one of 146 people killed in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911. The victims, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, were trapped behind doors that were locked by managers protecting against theft. The outrage over their deaths brought about sweeping new workplace-safety laws. For the descendants of the communities the victims left behind, their deaths serve as a reminder of a Jewish reality that now seems very distant.
But not for Boyarin. She has flown in for the occasion from North Carolina, where her husband holds a distinguished professorship in the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Despite his recent posting there, she still considers the Avenue A building in which she lived for some 30 years to be her home. She returned to make Passover there and to be with her community — and for this ceremony.
FULL story at link.