The annual meeting of the Jewish death care radicals is no place for a funeral director. That became clear just after lunch on the second full day of the North American Chevra Kadisha and Jewish Cemetery Conference, when an attorney named Efrem Grail unloaded on the coffin hawkers. “This is about a protected profession which…
Consolation is on my mind, doubtless because just the other day I addressed a convention of a truly extraordinary organization called Kavod v’Nichum, Honor and Comfort. They’d gathered in Philadelphia, and because I once wrote some words expressing my awe at their devotion and their decency, they invited me to be with them. They are…
After a two-year battle with cancer, Joseph Fitzgerald was determined to leave his final resting place to Mother Nature. On a quiet February day in rural Florida, Fitzgerald’s body was carried through the Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery on a bamboo stretcher made by family members. In an ecologically approved “green burial,” he was laid to…
New York State officials have interceded in the case of a defunct Jewish burial society that was selling graves on the open market, effectively forcing the society to give up its remaining plots. At least eight people who purchased graves at Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, N.Y., from the Przedborzer Friends Society received letters in…
A black market in Jewish graves is hiding in plain sight on the classified pages. Defunct Jewish burial societies have been selling cemetery plots at bargain basement prices through classified ads on Craigslist and in the print edition of the Forward — even though New York and New Jersey state laws bar these sales. Each…
If you want to be buried in New Jersey, try dying early in the week. Jewish law requires speedy burial, but bans Saturday funerals. So a death late in the week often means a funeral on a Sunday. And in New Jersey, a Sunday funeral means extra burial fees of up to $500, even more…
The numbers are still small, relative to the non-Jewish community.
Some of you may have heard or read in recent days about the “Patio Tomb” in Jerusalem’s southern neighborhood of Talpiot, a Second-Temple-period cave, now situated beneath an apartment building, in which a team of archaeologists sponsored by the University of North Carolina claims to have found the earliest known Christian burial site — indeed,…
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