And yet Koch, the New York City mayor who died last week at 88, stubbornly insisted on his own Jewishness, building a contradiction that followed him quite literally to his grave Monday.

A funeral at Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side was the mayor’s last stop before burial in a Christian cemetery in Washington Heights under a tombstone that says the word “Jewish” four times.

“A Polish Jew in an Episcopal graveyard in a largely Dominican neighborhood,” Mayor Bloomberg said at the service. “What could be more New York, or even more Ed Koch?”
Bill Clinton chats with Gov. Andrew Cuomo at Ed Koch’s funeral.
getty images
Bill Clinton chats with Gov. Andrew Cuomo at Ed Koch’s funeral.

A sweet multicultural sentiment, maybe, but one that is more Michael Bloomberg than Ed Koch. Koch’s epitaphs, which he picked himself, are parochial enough to make one wonder whether Episcopal mourners visiting their own dead will be made uncomfortable.

“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish,” reads the first, quoting slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The second epitaph is the Sh’ma, the third a paragraph that begins: “He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith.”

Israeli consul general Ido Aharoni, who spoke after Bill Clinton at the funeral, essentially called Koch an Israeli.

“Ed Koch was one of us,” said Israeli consul general. Koch was “one of the most important and influential American Zionists of our time.”

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Afterwards, Bruce Ratner, the mega-developer behind the Barclays Center, skipped out through a side door.

So did most of the New York notables and Koch administration alumni. The politicians, however, were stuck. They wanted to leave through the main exit, where they would pass in front of the flatbed NYPD truck packed with photographers. The civilians swept out and the elected officials waited behind, so it was largely notables who jammed in the bottleneck in the synagogue’s foyer.

City Council speaker Christine Quinn and former MTA chairman Joe Lhota, who might face each other in the New York City mayor’s race in November, waited near each other to walk through the front doors. New York City Comptroller John Liu, another mayoral hopeful, wasn’t far behind. City Councilman David Yassky, who Liu beat in the 2009 Comptroller race, was on the other side of the room. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who will likely run for governor someday, stood in the same pack as George Pataki, who has already held that post.