Adventures in Jewish Studies

The Association for Jewish Studies Podcast

Episode 36: Death & Community: Jewish Burial Societies

About the Episode

The Jewish life cycle includes rituals and customs to mark major rites of passage – birth, coming of age, marriage and parenthood. Likewise, there are traditions of how to navigate death and mourning, including how to care for the deceased and comfort the living, which is where we find Jewish burial societies. In this episode, guest scholars Cornelia Aust, Samuel Heilman, and Howard Lupovitch, along with host Avishay Artsy, look at the history of Jewish burial societies, how they have served their communities, and how they continue to evolve today.

Transcript

Avishay Artsy: Welcome to Adventures in Jewish Studies, the podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. In every episode, we take you on an entertaining and intellectual journey about Jewish life, history and culture, with the help of some of the world’s leading Jewish studies scholars. I’m your host for this episode, Avishay Artsy.

This episode is about a topic that’s pretty heavy. It’s about death. Which, we’re reminded in the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, is “the destiny of everyone.” 

The Jewish life cycle includes rituals and customs to mark major rites of passage – birth, coming of age, marriage and parenthood. Likewise, there are traditions of how to navigate death and mourning, including how to care for the deceased and comfort the living.

That’s where Jewish burial societies step in. A chevra kadisha literally translates to “holy society.” It’s a group of community volunteers that prepares Jewish bodies for burial. They make sure the deceased are treated properly – physically and religiously – at every step of the process. And they help the mourners grieve and then reintegrate into the community and the world.

Chevrot kadisha could be found throughout Jewish communities in Europe. Toward the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Jewish immigrants in the diaspora would form chevrot kadisha often as part of other Jewish mutual aid societies, known as landsmanshaftn, at times when Jews were denied assistance elsewhere.

In this episode of Adventures in Jewish Studies, we’ll look at the history of Jewish burial societies, how they have served their communities, and how they continue to evolve today. 

For hundreds of years, when Jews, particularly in Eastern and Central Europe, formed new communities, among the first things they did was create a chevra kadisha.

Howard Lupovitch: I know this was a pretty widespread Central European phenomenon. But certainly by the end of the eighteenth century, there are these types of organizations in Amsterdam and in the Ottoman Empire, in Russia, they’re elsewhere as well, especially in small and upstart Jewish communities.

Avishay Artsy: Howard Lupovitch is a professor of history and director of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic Studies at Wayne State University.

Howard Lupovitch: My major interest is writing about how Jewish communities function structurally, a social and institutional history, and the chevra kadisha is one of a network of these voluntary associations in the Jewish community, the chevra, chevrot…

Avishay Artsy: It was considered an honor to be part of the chevra kadisha. It would draw in the most pious members of the community. It also carried with it social prestige. Its members generally came from the upper echelons of the Jewish community.

Cornelia Aust is a historian at The Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institute of German-Jewish Studies in Essen, Germany.

Cornelia Aust: They basically were based on three pillars of Judaism. One, Torah, so prayer. One, avodah, the service to God. And the third one, maybe the most important one, gemilut hasadim, which is loving kindness and basically refers to an act of charity that cannot be returned by the recipient.

Avishay Artsy: The work of the chevra kadisha sometimes begins before death. They might be summoned to assist a gosses, someone who is at death’s door, to recite the vidui, the deathbed confession. The dying person might also bless their children and other family members. Another tradition has the person, with their dying breath, recite the first verse of the Shema prayer: “Hear O Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Once the person has died, a number of rituals occur.

Samuel Heilman: You're supposed to put the body on the floor and the feet facing Jerusalem. Open the window, maybe because of the idea that somehow the neshama will escape. But of course, why the neshama can't go through walls or windows, I don't know.

Avishay Artsy: Samuel Heilman is emeritus distinguished professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Queens College in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In his book “When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son,” he writes about volunteering with a chevra kadisha in suburban New York and in Jerusalem, where he now lives.

Samuel Heilman: In Jerusalem, they’re buried often in the same day. It's considered unpleasant for the body to be not at rest. So in Jerusalem, you even have nighttime funerals. The idea among Jews is to bury the body as quickly as possible. It's not always been that case. We read in the Bible about people being embalmed, about Joseph and Jacob being embalmed. But in Judaism, in traditional Judaism, an early burial, preferably the same day or the next day. 

Avishay Artsy: The liminal period between death and burial is known as aninut. The grief-stricken family member is an onen. The idea is to get the freshly bereaved through this period quickly so mourning can begin.

Samuel Heilman: The survivor wants to mourn and the dead one wants to go on to the next plane of existence. So it's a period of time when, in Jewish tradition, the onen has no responsibilities. Doesn't have to pray, doesn't have to, nothing. The only thing that he or she has to concern himself with is making certain that the person who has died is taken care of and sent on his way. 

Avishay Artsy: In fact, Jewish custom discourages comforting the mourner before the burial. Pirkei Avot, a compilation of ethical teachings, instructs: “Do not console a person whose deceased relative lies before him.” 

After the death, Lupovitch says, the chevra kadisha brings the body to a funeral parlor.

Howard Lupovitch: They would stand vigil over the body the entire time from death all the way until burial. The body was never left unaccompanied. And somebody had to be there all the time. And it was the responsibility of the chevra kadisha to do that. 

Avishay Artsy: This is called shemirah: watching or guarding. The guard is the shomer. The idea originally was to protect the body from theft, vermin, or desecration, but now it’s done as a show of respect. Shemirah used to take place in people’s homes.

Samuel Heilman: The room that we call the living room; why do we call it the living room? Because it's an inversion of what it usually was. The living room is where they laid out the dead person. It was the dead room. But you don't want to call it the dead room, so you call it the living room. And that's why these funeral parlors, they make them look like nice living rooms, you know, places to live. But of course, they're transitional places.

Avishay Artsy: The chevrot kadisha that Heilman was part of worked in the back rooms of funeral parlors.

Samuel Heilman: If people saw the back of the funeral parlor, they would be horrified. Because the back is not as beautiful as the front. It's a place with dead bodies, all kinds of tools, smells, the whole work. 

Avishay Artsy: It’s in these spaces that the chevra kadisha performs tahara, ritual purification, to prepare the body for burial. 

Samuel Heilman: In Jewish law, the ultimate source of impurity is death. A dead body, a dead animal, any place where death exists, that's impure. So in order to move from life to eternal life, you have to go through a purification process. 

Avishay Artsy: That process starts with fully washing the body as prayers and psalms are recited.

Samuel Heilman: The body is dressed in a ritual fashion. All bodies, rich or poor, are dressed in the same shrouds. Men do men. Women do women. Their modesty. The face is covered during the process, and the private parts are covered until the shrouds are put on.

Avishay Artsy: The shrouds, or tachrichim, are simple white linen or muslin garments.

Samuel Heilman: You have pants, but they’re pants that are closed at the feet. You pull up the pants. There's a shirt. And then on top of that is a kittel, a long white garment. And then the head is covered with a hood. You don't see the face. And underneath the hood, there are pieces of broken ceramics put on the eyes and the mouth. There's oil and vinegar put on the brow of the dead person because that was the secret way in which Jews made sure that in their cemeteries only Jews would be buried. So they would smell the oil and the vinegar and they'd know that this person had, in fact, been a Jew.

Avishay Artsy: The men are covered in a tallit, a prayer cloak, with one of the tzitzit, the fringes, cut off. The fringe is cut to show that the tallit will no longer be used.

Samuel Heilman: Here in Jerusalem, the oldest son is supposed to come in at the very end and close the eyes of his father after the father has been dressed in shrouds.

Avishay Artsy: The funeral service, or levaya, is held at the funeral parlor. It includes the delivery of a eulogy, or hesped, in honor of the deceased. It praises the person’s accomplishments and is meant to both comfort the relatives and remind attendees about what really matters in life.

Samuel Heilman: So a hesped is really an opportunity not just to say goodbye and nice things about the dead person, but to tell the living people, think about what you're doing with your life and what people will think about you and what you want said at your funeral. So that's really what the hesped is about.

Avishay Artsy: Jewish traditions around death are based on custom rather than strict law. They've evolved over centuries. New rituals have been created, discarded, and incorporated from neighboring religions and cultures.

Jews no longer hire professional women singers to wail at a funeral. Mourners don’t cut off their hair, put on sackcloth, rub ashes on their heads, or walk around barefoot.

But some rituals have stuck around. The immediate family members of the dead tear their clothes as a way to publicly express grief. This is called kriah, or tearing. In the Hebrew bible, this was done at the moment one heard news of a death. The modern practice is for mourners to tear their clothing just before the funeral. Some choose to tear a black ribbon instead.

The body is then brought out. In Israel, it’s usually wrapped in a shroud. In the US, it’s more customary to place the body in a simple pine box.

Attendees then form two parallel lines facing each other and the mourners walk between them and are given words of comfort. This is the first time they’re treated as mourners.

Samuel Heilman: Then you walk the body to the grave site. Even though you're burying quickly, you want to show that you're reluctant to leave this person. So there are stops along the way. There are very famous lines, including the one, “the snare has been broken and we've escaped.” And that is an extraordinarily interesting line because, who has escaped? Is it the dead who’s escaped? The soul who’s escaped the body? Or is it the living who’ve escaped the death? And it is a sentence, a verse that's said by the living. And it has a double entendre. And there's so much of that in the process of saying goodbye to a dead person.

Avishay Artsy: At the gravesite, the members of the chevra kadisha lay the body in its final resting place. The burial is called the kvura.

Samuel Heilman: In America, very often when you have a burial, it's done by union workers, grave diggers. They have ropes and pulleys and so on to lower the body to the grave. In Israel, a member of the chevra kadisha jumps into the grave and the body is handed from person to person and to someone who lays it down in the ground.

Avishay Artsy: Mourners take turns shoveling dirt into the grave.

Samuel Heilman: And no doubt that the process of hearing dirt and stones covering a dead person, covering a grave makes one recognize, yes, this is finality. And I'm no longer going to think of this person as a dead person. In fact, in traditional Judaism, you don't have an open coffin. You don't look at the face of death. You don't want to remember the person as a dead person. You want to remember the person as a living person.

Avishay Artsy: There were burial societies that existed in antiquity and the Middle Ages. But, Cornelia Aust says, they usually only served their own members and not the wider community. 

Cornelia Aust: So the first burial societies of the form we know from the early modern period and in the nineteenth century emerged in the Iberian Peninsula in the thirteenth century. They were responsible for visiting and taking care of the sick, organizing the burial, and sometimes also supporting the poor or endowments of orphan brides. And then we see those burial societies emerge in Italy in the sixteenth century and in Central Europe. The first one was founded in Prague in 1564. 

Avishay Artsy: More burial societies were formed in the seventeenth century, and by the early eighteenth century, most Jewish communities in Poland, as well as in German-speaking lands, had a burial society. Aust says their growth tracks with two developments in the early modern period in Jewish history in Europe.

Cornelia Aust: One is the increasing cohesion of self-government of Jewish communities, of which the burial society was part of. And the other one is an explosion of works of codification of law, to fix rituals, to ensure good conduct. And along these lines also the burial societies emerged and also drew their authority from taking part in this kind of codification of law.

Avishay Artsy: Howard Lupovitch says the growth of the chevra kadisha also parallels an increased preoccupation among Jews with the Messianic age and redemption.

Howard Lupovitch: And so the chevra kadisha, they weren't only concerned with the rituals of preparing the body and standing vigil over the body and making sure the burial took place. They were also taking on the responsibility of making sure that the soul properly passed from this world to the next. The central text of the Prague chevra kadisha was called Ma’avar Yabok, Crossing the Yabok. In Sefer Breishit, that's the story of Jacob crossing this river and communing with something heavenly. And the chevra kadisha saw it as their responsibility to make sure that the deceased was properly prepared, the soul was prepared, and that the community was doing what was necessary to help the deceased's soul pass properly to the next world.

Avishay Artsy: It’s customary for the chevra kadisha to fast on the seventh day of the month of Adar, the anniversary of Moses’ death. They would recite special prayers and meditations, read the names of those for whom they performed tahara in the past year, and hand out tzedakah, charity. The night after the fast, they would hold a festive banquet.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the chevra kadisha expanded its work from death and burial to what we’d now call health care. The chevra kadisha created and ran a hekdesh, a kind of charitable health institution in communities that had no hospitals.

Howard Lupovitch: And after a certain point, the chevra kadisha began to hire physicians and other health care workers, nurses and others, to be able to administer not only to the dead and to the mourners, but also to the living, to the infirmed and to the elderly.

Avishay Artsy: While members of the chevra kadisha worked as volunteers, there were perks, including priority access to the hekdesh. Eventually, others in the Jewish community began to pay an annual fee to the chevra kadisha in exchange for health care.

Howard Lupovitch: So you have this situation, it's odd to speak of it this way, where the chevra kadisha begins to function almost like a modern HMO, where they're collecting dues from members of the Jewish community who are not part of the chevra kadisha and from those who are, and in exchange, they're providing health and medical benefits to the Jewish community.

Avishay Artsy: In Jewish communities where the chevra kadisha was the top leadership, they also served as the beit din, or rabbinical court, adjudicating cases that had nothing to do with death or burial or health care. And they took on other non-medical roles too, Aust says.

Cornelia Aust: For example, they took over the distribution of flour for Passover. They got involved in a tax for kosher meat, and you could basically see how they took over a lot of functions that would actually be the kahal, was the tradition leadership of the Jewish community.

Avishay Artsy: The chevra kadisha also became an entry point for women to take on leadership roles in the community. Women were needed to stand vigil and prepare the bodies of deceased women. Sometimes those women volunteers – particularly wealthy widows – rose to prominent positions through the chevra kadisha.

There were also junior wings of the chevra kadisha, in which younger Jews would apprentice and eventually take on positions of leadership themselves.

Howard Lupovitch: The existence of this junior wing was a way to make sure that when the older wing, when they started to die off, you'd have this new round of committed volunteers both to deal with the ritual aspects and the financial aspects.

Avishay Artsy: Sometimes younger Jews brought different ideas about how the chevra kadisha should operate. Aust points to examples in Germany in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century during the haskalah, or the Jewish Enlightenment, when Jews felt pressure to assimilate and to discard practices that might seem strange or outdated. Younger Jews wanted, among other things, to delay burial until three days after death.

Cornelia Aust: This is a big debate at the late eighteenth century about early burial because in Judaism and today again you bury within 24 hours, but at the late eighteenth century, people suddenly had those cases where people woke up again before being buried or something, because they were supposed to be dead, but they weren't. And those new societies wanted to bury only after three days and not within 24 hours.

Avishay Artsy: Even after the burial, the chevra kadisha continued to serve the immediate family.

Howard Lupovitch: This was a sort of a communal effort to help the family of the deceased reconnect with a sense of normalcy following grief and following loss and how to deal with the grief.

Avishay Artsy: The mourners leave the cemetery and return home to begin the shiva, the seven-day mourning period. The chevra kadisha helps to arrange prayer services and meals.

Samuel Heilman: You have to eat certain foods, round foods, eggs, for example, that symbolize life. You light a candle. The candle symbolizes the soul. When it's burned out at the end of seven days and the mourning is over. You are forced to sequester yourself in a place where you’ll sit shiva. But paradoxically, that sequestered place is open to everybody. So the door's open and for the seven days you're surrounded by people, more people than you've had in a long time. Everybody that ever knew the deceased or the mourners comes, and you're constantly talking. You're talking about the dead person. You're reminiscing about the dead person. You're seeing all the people in the dead person's life. All of that is to bring you back to life, because that's the message. You're not dead. You're going to come back to life. 

Avishay Artsy: Rabbinic law dictates that mourners act during the shiva the way they would during the Day of Atonement - no working, bathing, putting on makeup, having sex or wearing leather shoes. A modern custom is to cover the mirrors in the home, to help focus on the inner spirit and not outer physical appearances. Mourners sit low to the ground, on low stools or cushions or on the floor, while visitors sit in the home’s regular couches and chairs. Some older practices, like overturning the beds and sleeping on the floor, are no longer practiced.

Samuel Heilman: At the end of the seven days. Someone comes in the morning of the seventh day and says, get up. You get up and you walk outside. You walk around the block or whatever. And I have to tell you, after six and a half days inside, when you go outside, you suddenly look at the world and it looks brand new to you. And it's an extraordinary experience. If you haven't done it, I mean, it really makes you feel like, my God, I'm back at life.

Avishay Artsy: The shiva is the first part of the sheloshim, the first month of mourning. Traditionally the mourner doesn’t shave or cut their hair during that month. They’re also restricted from attending celebrations, especially involving live music.

A parent’s death requires saying the kaddish prayer three times a day for the first year, the Shneim asar chodesh. It requires a minyan of at least ten congregants.

Samuel Heilman: At the end, many people say the hardest thing about kaddish is ending it because you somehow feel an absence. The truth is that after my year of saying kaddish for my father, I became a regular shul goer thereafter.

Avishay Artsy: After the first year, kaddish is recited at the yahrzeit, or anniversary of a parent’s death. There’s also the Yizkor prayer for the dead that’s recited in the synagogue four times a year. These customs ensure that one takes the time to grieve and remember the dead while surrounded by community.

Samuel Heilman: That's why it's so difficult to stop it at the end. Because then you think, Well, wait, now will I forget the dead person? And the answer is, even if you want to, you can't at that point. It's become second nature.

Avishay Artsy: Heilman says chevra kadisha continue to attract Jews who want to care for their communities.

Samuel Heilman: Community is life and chevra kadisha is life. And there are many people now who have wanted to create their own chevra kadisha to bury their own people.

Avishay Artsy: Chevrot kadisha largely disappeared in Eastern and Central Europe after the Holocaust. 

But they continued to function, and still do, in the diaspora, including in the US, Canada, and in Israel. 

Just as chevrot kadisha changed during the Jewish enlightenment period of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, their work continues to evolve. 

There’s now a growing number of chevrot kadisha serving reform Jews, not just Orthodox and traditional communities.

A broader movement towards pluralism and inclusivity in Judaism has led to the creation of new guidelines including how a chevra kadisha can perform and receive tahara for gender non-conforming and transgender Jews.

And after the October 7th attacks in Israel, chevrot kadisha were tasked with the gruesome but essential job of identifying the remains of the victims of the Hamas attacks and preparing them for burial. 

Finally, a larger societal and cultural shift towards death acceptance – in the form of death cafes, death doulas, and the death-positivity movement – has also reignited interest in the work of the chevra kadisha.

Because beyond their work tending to the dead, Aust says, the chevra kadisha reminds Jews of what matters.

Cornelia Aust: It's a good example of ways of forming a community, of being together, of helping each other. It's like a very essential feeling of fulfilling duties that keep a Jewish community together. As I said also in the historical sense, there was a social consensus. There was a consensus about the importance of the burial society, of their tasks of accompanying the sick and the dying in their last hours and then taking care of them, no matter if they were your family or not. I think that's one of the things that burial societies clearly can point us to, is show how it keeps a community together.

Avishay Artsy: Adventures in Jewish Studies is made possible with generous support from The Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation and the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation. The executive producer of the podcast is Warren Hoffman. I’m the lead producer for this episode.

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Executive Producer: Warren Hoffman, PhD

Producers: Avishay Artsy and Erin Phillips