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.”

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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

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