Burial battle
What happens when an elderly woman in hospice wants to move her husband to a different cemetery so the family can be buried together -- and the rabbi says no? The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:
Burying loved ones is never easy, but Shelly Frankel has a dilemma more unusual than most.
Mrs. Frankel's mother, Roberta Tobin, 81, is in hospice care with inoperable cancer. She wants to be buried when the time comes in the Star of David section of Homewood Cemetery in Point Breeze with her husband and son, who died 43 years apart, both of heart disease.
But her husband is not buried at Star of David. He's at Poale Zedeck Cemetery in Richland, owned and operated by the Orthodox congregation of the same name in Squirrel Hill. Rabbi Yisroel Miller, who was head rabbi at Paole Zedeck but has since moved away, decided last year that moving the remains would violate Jewish law.
The family filed last week for a court order to compel an exhumation, but whether a civil court will want to wade into the separation of synagogue and state remains to be seen. Meanwhile, after a yearlong stalemate, the family and congregation are talking again about a possible solution.
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I had exactly this problem with my parents. My father was buried in the cemetery maintained by our synagogue which later merged with another synagogue. Altho it was a Conservative synagogue, the rabbi was Orthodox. My father died the same day as J.F. Kennedy and, tho he was Chairman of the Burial Committee, had not purchased a plot for the family. In the turmoil that weekend, the plot that was given for him was next to the wall and had severe drainage problems. We had to go with shovels and soil everytime we visited to repair the gravesite. When my mother was diagnosed with tyerminal cancer, she asked us to make arrangements for himm to be moved to the same cemetery in which she would be buried, one with no maintenance problems. After she died and was buried, we went to the rabbi at the merged synagogue and asked him to reunite our parents in death., He refused citing much of what was reported in the article. We insisted that he go to a higher authority and appealed the case to the expert on these matters (per Yeshiva University) who lived in Monsey. After several months, that rabbi issued the responsa that this is permissible to unite my mother and father. It should be on record as a precedent for Mrs. Frankel.
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Joshua Zev Levin
12/23/09 08:20 PM
The First Amendment is not incumbent on the Judicial Branch, only on the Legislative Branch, plus those powers delegated to the Executive Branch by Statute Law. Courts are free to apply Religious Law when appropriate, and this seems to be such a case.