Dueling Funeral Homes Fight Over Mandel Name
The Chicago Tribune is reporting trouble in Skokie, Illinois, as two Jewish funeral parlors duke it out in court for the use of one man’s name.
It goes something like this: Service Corp. International, the company that owns the original parlor, Lloyd Mandel Levayah Funerals, is suing Lloyd Mandel himself, the former owner of Levayah. The company is demanding that the court prohibit Mr. Mandel from using his name for his new funeral service business, aptly named Lloyd Mandel Mitzvah Memorial Funerals. To add icing on the kosher cake, the company is also asking for unspecified damages. According to the Tribune, the lawsuit claims that when Mandel sold his funeral service in 1995, he also sold the name of the business. Now that Mandel has opened a new funeral business in his name, the company is accusing him of violating the earlier agreement.
While court documents show that Service Corp. International believes that Mandel’s new business has caused confusion and “substantial and irreparable harm,” Mandel disputes this claim, telling the Tribune, “I have the right to use my name.”
Both business owners found an appropriate outlet in which to vent their frustrations: the Tribune’s obituary section. Turns out, the funeral business is not all fun and games.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO