Conservative Jewish Cemetery Opens Section for Interfaith Families
Image by Facebook / Congregation B’nai Israel
By Sam Kestenbaum December 5, 2017
Interfaith families may now be buried together in a cemetery plot belonging to Congregation B’nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the coastal New Jersey town of Toms River.
“There are always questions about burial of non-Jewish spouses in our cemetery,” Glenn Jacobs, a member of the synagogue’s cemetery committee told the website Patch.com, “and some older Jewish members have bought plots in non-Jewish cemeteries in order to be buried with their spouses.”
Jacobs said the decision was in response to changing demographics of the synagogue, which has attracted converts who may still have non-Jewish family. Synagogue leaders estimated that about a third of the synagogue is made up of intermarried families.
Intermarriage has long been a point of division within the Conservative movement, which maintains an official ban on rabbis performing interfaith marriages — but also seeks to welcome couples who are already intermarried. In 2010, the Rabbinical Assemby’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards published a Responsa regarding the burial of non-Jewish spouses which permitted their burial in a separate section of a Jewish cemetery.
Email Sam Kestenbaum at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum
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
