Cremation and The Holocaust
In your column of Dec 31st, you explained the importance of burial vs cremation, with respect to the Jewish belief in the Revival of the Dead, the final reward when the body is reunited with the soul, something which may be lost on one who forfeits the body to cremation.
Unfortunately, there are so many of us eternally mourning all the victims of the Nazis, whose bodies were cremated en mass by no choice of their own. How does Judaism deal with those martyrs who never had a choice with respect to the final reward you discussed?
Cremation or Burial
My mother was recently put into hospice and for the first time she’s facing death as a reality. We’ve been discussing burial and her desire, and she has been leaning towards cremation so not to put any financial burden on our family. Something feels wrong to me about that; to me it’s worth a financial stretch to have her buried the traditional way, but I wanted to know if Jewish law is ok with cremation or is there a real reason to prefer burial?
Cremation
As my mother has gotten older she has expressed a desire to be cremated. I have spoken to her about this and reminded her that she couldn’t be interred in a ‘Jewish’ cemetery (And asked her if 6 million Jews being burned wasn’t enough). She has resisted my arguments. I fear that if she dies, I won’t be able to attend her funeral. I could use some help here.
Coffins and Burial
A company is selling “a variety of eco-friendly, biodegradable burial products including Ecopod, a kayak-shaped coffin made out of recycled newspapers,” according to the newspaper story, it will also offer “fair-trade bamboo caskets lined w/bleached cotton” and “more traditional-looking handcrafted coffins made of wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. “Prices of the biodegradable containers start at about $100 for a basic cardboard box. “Biodegradable coffins are part of a larger trend toward ‘natural’ burials, which require no formaldehyde embalming, cement vaults, chemical lawn treatments or laminated caskets,” the article also says.
This all sounds very Jewish to me (for different basic
reasons, of course); I’d like to know if a traditional burial would be
kosher in a cardboard box or recycled newspaper coffin — since both cardboard and newspaper are basically made of wood to start with. Or might there be other elements in them to render such things unkosher?
Why is it that one needs to bury the dishes to make them kosher again?
I recently visited my grandmother (who’s nearly 90 and not in the greatest health), and she told me many things about the family I never knew before. One thing she told me had me very confused and I was hoping you could shed some light on it for me. My grandmother shocked me by telling me that her and my Grandpa kept kosher the first years of their marriage until the kids were young. Then, one day when they were away on vacation, upon returning they realized that the maid had mixed up the meat and milk dishes. My grandmother wasn’t about to dig a hole in the back yard to bury the dishes to make them kosher again, so she decided on the spot that they were done with kosher. Our family, although proudly Jewish, has had nothing to do with kosher, or nearly any other observance for that matter, ever since. That decision obviously had a major impact on the future of her family for generations to come, and it was all based on the need to bury the dishes. Why is it that one needs to bury the dishes to make them kosher again? Dishes don’t die to need to come back to life or something…the whole thing has been upsetting to me and I need some explanation.