Jewish Burial for Young Conservative Convert Marred in Madrid
A 13-year-old boy was buried in a special section in Madrid’s Jewish cemetery because he had a Conservative conversion.
Gai Ben-David died last weekend after suffering for years from brain cancer. He was buried Sunday in a section of Madrid’s Jewish cemetery set off by a row of trees and reserved for those whose Jewishness is in question.
Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi, Shlomo Amar, ruled that since Gai had a non-Jewish mother and was converted by a Conservative rabbi that he should not be buried in the main cemetery. Amar had been asked to rule on the issue by Rabbi Moshe Ben-Dahan, the chief Orthodox rabbi of Madrid.
Gai, of Bogota, Colombia, celebrated his bar mitzvah last June at Congregation Ahavath Shalom in Fort Worth, Texas.
The Rabbinical Assembly, the worldwide association of Conservative and Masorti rabbis, said in a statement that “We are dismayed that this exemplary Jewish boy … was not permitted a burial in the main section of Madrid’s Jewish cemetery, as Rabbi Amar erroneously declared his halachic conversion to be insufficient to bury him where he belongs.
“In Gai’s memory, we remind ourselves that the Jewish People are one people bound together by common history and practice. We therefore not only take great offense at Rabbi Amar’s incorrect and inhumane interpretation of Jewish law, we also abhor this misuse of power that has increased the suffering of a Jewish family grieving the loss of a child.”
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
