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in
the

multi-generational families

Comforting Those
Who Grieve

The Kaufman Family

BARBARA LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER

A

merica’s family-owned
funeral homes are being
gobbled up by conglomer-
ates, but in the Detroit area, two
Jewish funeral homes are bucking
the national trend.
At Ira Kaufman Chapel in
Southfield, Chad Techner is the
fourth-generation of his fam-
ily to serve as a funeral director.
The Dorfman Chapel in West
Bloomfield has father-and-son

The Dorfman Family

Weekly through May 3, when the JN holds its 75th
anniversary gala, we will run profiles of multi-
generational families involved in the community.
Readers are invited to share their multi-generational
photos, a brief description of those pictured and contact
information via email to msmith@djnfoundation.org.
Digital photos need to be 1mb jpgs. Mail print photos to
the JN, with your description. To learn about the gala,
go to djnfoundation.org. Thanks!

directors in Alan and Jonathan
Dorfman.
Founder Ira Kaufman opened
his funeral home in 1941 when
he was 45, in a two-family Detroit
house remodeled as a chapel. His
son, Herb, now 94, joined him
in the late 1950s and helped Ira
build the Southfield chapel in
Southfield, where they’ve been
since 1961.
David Techner, 66, got to know
the Kaufman family when he was
15 and dating Herb’s daughter
Ilene, now his wife of 45 years.
Techner worked at the chapel
through his college years and start-
ed full time after graduating from
Wayne State University’s School of
Mortuary Science. Techner’s son,
Chad, 37, joined the company in
2010.
(The chapel’s fourth funeral
director, Josh Tobias, is not official-
ly a member of the family, but Herb
calls him “my son.”)
Kaufman belongs to a half-dozen
congregations. Techner is a long-
time member of Temple Israel,
where he and his wife underwrite
the annual Alicia Joy Techner
Parenting Conference in memory of
their daughter, who was 8 months
old when she died in 1978. They see
their business as a service to the
community they so love.
David has made a specialty of
helping children understand death
and dying. He doesn’t want others
to experience what he did at age 9,

when he came home from school
to find his house full of people for
his grandfather’s shivah; he and his
brothers hadn’t been told about the
death or the funeral.
He co-authored A Candle for
Grandpa: A Guide to the Jewish
Funeral for Children and Parents. A
short film he made with local pro-
ducer Sue Marx in 1999, Generation
to Generation: Jewish Families Talk
About Death, won several awards,
including an Emmy.
Chad is the chapel’s tech guru.
He devised a way to provide live-
streaming from any location, even
cemeteries, for most of the 350 to
400 funerals they handle every year.
Recently Kaufman Chapel started
using the DJN Foundation’s archives
to find Jewish News stories that men-
tioned the deceased. They print the
stories and create a keepsake book
for the family.
Chad has 2-year-old twins, a boy
and a girl; perhaps one or both will
be the fifth generation of Kaufman
family funeral directors.

THE DORFMAN FAMILY

Alan Dorfman, 79, started Alan
H. Dorfman Funeral Direction in
1991, after working for 25 years at
Hebrew Memorial Chapel. At first,
he offered only graveside services.
His son, Jonathan, 48, was
studying psychology at Michigan
State at the time and planning
to become a neurosurgeon. Alan
asked him if he would consider

From the DJN

Davidson Digital Archive

O

K — all readers who have degrees from Wayne State
University raise your hands! I’ll bet there are lots of
hands in the air now, including my own. I earned a mas-
ter’s degree in history from Wayne in 1987. Indeed, there are thou-
sands of Wayne State graduates around the world. I was reminded
of this as the university celebrates its 150th birthday this year. So,
naturally, I wondered what would I find in the Davidson Digital
Archives?
Wayne State traces its roots to the founding
of the Detroit Medical College (now the School
of Medicine) founded in 1868. Since that time,
a group of colleges, such as the Detroit Normal
Training School (“normal” colleges specialized
in training teachers) and the Detroit Junior
College, both of which, along with the medical
school, became the College of the City of Detroit
Mike Smith
before becoming Wayne University in 1934. In
Detroit Jewish News
1959, Wayne became the state university we
Foundation Archivist
now know, a world-class research university that

62

April 5 • 2018

jn

produced some of the Detroit Jewish community’s
leading citizens like Eugene Driker, the late William
Davidson and the late Eugene Applebaum.
The first story I could find was on the front
page of the Feb. 2, 1934, issue of the Detroit Jewish
Chronicle and the Legal Chronicle (note that
for few years, The Chronicle had two names). It
reported that Dr. Lawrence Seltzer, professor
of economics at Wayne University, had been
appointed to a federal advisory board.
But, just entering Wayne State University in the search revealed
16,867 pages from the JN and The Chronicle, where the university
was mentioned in a story. That’s of lot of coverage about a lot of
Wayne State students, graduates and programs! I also found pho-
tos of Jewish students participating in Hillel at Wayne State, now
known as Hillel of Metro Detroit. Happy birthday, Wayne! •

Want to learn more? Go to the DJN Foundation archives,
available for free at www.djnfoundation.org.

Herb and Ira Kaufman

being a funeral director instead,
and Jonathan’s life direction
changed. He joined the business
in 1991 and was the driving force
behind building the Dorfman
Chapel in Farmington Hills, the
first new Jewish funeral home in
35 years.
Stephanie Dorfman, Alan’s wife
and Jonathan’s mother — and a
retired teacher — is their secretary.
Jonathan finished his under-
graduate degree from MSU, then
earned a second bachelor’s, in
mortuary science, from Wayne
State. He also has a master’s in
psychology from MSU, which he
said has been very helpful in his
grief counseling work.
Like David Techner, Jonathan
sees his job as a community ser-
vice, and that’s a big reason why
he’s not interested in selling to a
conglomerate. “Like doctors, we
are on call 24/7,” he said. “I would
be a lot less interested in being on
call around the clock for someone
else’s business. The service end
tends not to be as good in funeral
homes after a merger.”
Will there be a third genera-
tion of Dorfmans at the chapel?
With two daughters and two sons
aged 12 to 20, Jonathan hopes
that will be the case. He says his
older daughter, 20, is definitely not
interested in the funeral business,
but his son, Cooper, 18, who will
be a freshman at Michigan State in
the fall, just might be. •