Woman-owned funeral home on Fourth keeps service affordable and attentive

For more than 40 years, Doris Amen has been hard at work keeping the business of death alive.

The 70-year-old funeral director and owner of Jurek Park Slope Funeral Home, at 728 Fourth Ave. at 23rd Street, used her undergraduate science education to break into the business decades ago and has been on an upward trajectory ever since.

“I helped the gentleman I was dating, who I eventually married and then divorced,” Amen said. “I had a background in the biological sciences so I thought, you know, I could help him with that … I helped him study and decided, ‘this is easy stuff.’”

Amen graduated first in her class in 1980 from The American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Services and was one of few women in the field at the time.

“I became like a glorified secretary. It was 1980, all the men were doing all the work,” Amen said. “I would go with them and they would make fun of me.”

In response, she told them that one day she was going to own her own funeral home.

“They thought I was nuts. Even the women there thought I was nuts,” she said.

In 1989, she bought Jurek Park Slope, and 37 years later both she and the business are still going strong.

“I felt like I knew this woman for 50 years,” said Maria Jagelka, who was present for her mother’s viewing at the time of the interview. She called Amen on Sunday, Sept. 13, when her mother died, after discovering that the funeral home they had planned to use had shut down.

“[Doris] said to me, ‘turn around and give me all the information I need … all you have to do is worry about showing up.’”

“I got up this morning and was very anxious … it was always [just] me and my mother, I didn’t know how I was going to react to seeing her in a coffin,” Jagelka said. “When I walked in … it’s hard to explain, I just felt so at ease. And she did this, Doris, and I will never, ever forget this woman.”

Along with her ability to make anyone she speaks to feel like family, one of Amen’s trademarks is her low prices for services.

“In any type of business, your two greatest enemies are your payroll and your rent or your mortgage,” she said. “And if you could get rid of that, you can do a lot of things.”

Amen said she had always told herself that if and when she made it, she would make sure to give back to the community. Now that she is able to do so, she is holding steadfast on that promise.

Operating the funeral home with only a handful of employees has not always been easy, especially during times such as the 2020 pandemic. Amen said the funeral home was filled with the bodies of those who had died, and while it took months for her to catch up, she still made it a point to let family members say goodbye and figured out how to provide open-casket viewings.

“How can you deny people that hadn’t seen their loved ones in the hospital?” Amen said. “Now they can’t see them in the funeral home? No.”

When asked whether dealing with death, especially in this capacity, has ever been difficult for her, Amen gently but quickly answered “no.”

“Because I make something that’s not attractive a little easier,” she said. “That’s what I do.”