Burial Rules Compound Family’s Tragedy

In a strange and sorrowful postscript to last week’s twin suicide bombings, the parents of 15-year-old victim Grigory Pesahovic stood helpless in a cemetery, unable to find a place to bury their son.

“Give me a spade. . . . I’ll bury him alone--I don’t care where,” declared the boy’s father, Yevgeny, standing by the coffin and holding on to his weeping former wife, according to a detailed account of the family’s ordeal published in the newspaper Maariv.

In death, “Grisha” was turned away first from a Jewish cemetery because he wasn’t deemed Jewish enough and then from a Greek Orthodox plot in the cemetery on the Mount of Olives because the family wouldn’t allow Christian prayers over him.

After an hourlong standoff Friday at the second cemetery, the boy’s parents, pallbearers and a knot of mourners had no choice but to take Grisha’s body back down the hill to the waiting hearse.

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The remains lay in a hospital refrigerator over the Jewish Sabbath until, through the intervention of an Israeli Cabinet minister and special pleas to the Religious Affairs Ministry, a place was found Sunday in a section of Jerusalem’s municipal Har Hamenuhot cemetery set aside for members of the Bahai faith, which does not require a religious burial.

The chaos surrounding the burial, deplored by all parties involved, underscored the far-reaching effects of unyielding religious beliefs here. “It was an absurd, tragic spectacle,” said Immigration Minister Yuli Edelstein.

After hearing of the family’s predicament on radio news Friday, Edelstein made calls on his cellular telephone to try to find a cemetery that would take the boy.

“Imagine how a minister of the state of Israel must feel when he has to sit in his car in a parking lot, while the corpse of a terror victim is being held in the hospital, and you have to find someone who’ll do you a favor and bury the body,” Edelstein recounted.

The problem was that Grisha, who had immigrated to Israel from Russia with his mother, Olga, two years ago, was a descendant of a mixed marriage. His maternal grandfather had married a non-Jew in the former Soviet Union.

Although his mother and father both considered themselves Jewish, had a Jewish surname, had lived as Jews in Russia and had made the pilgrimage to Israel, under Jewish law Grisha was not a Jew and therefore could not be buried with other Jews. (Jewish law holds that for a child to be a Jew, his mother must be Jewish.)

“He lived as a Jew in the land of Israel. My son Grisha was not a Christian. I am not ready to let him be buried as a Christian,” his mother wailed, according to the Maariv account.

Edelstein thinks that the travesty might have been avoided if the family had initially applied for one of the sections recently set aside in 16 cemeteries nationwide for people whose Jewishness is not officially proved.

But the family either was unaware of that option or had been ill-advised by some bureaucrat, Edelstein said in a telephone interview, and therefore went to a Christian cemetery instead in the mistaken belief that it allowed non-religious burials.

“There was a terrible mistake,” Edelstein said. “I understand that all these bureaucratic explanations do not help the tragedy of the family.”

A spokesman for the Ministry of Religious Affairs, however, said Pesahovic “wasn’t a questionable Jew. There is no doubt that he wasn’t Jewish.” The correct alternative, said the spokesman, Shimon Mallka, would have been to inter the youth on a kibbutz that allows secular burials.

But the boy’s mother rejected that option because she wanted his grave close to Jerusalem, where she lives.

While defending the current system, Mallka was not without sympathy. “It is a painful case. The boy died in Israel and for Israel, and still received no dignified burial,” he said.

Grisha, described in news accounts as a solitary teenager who had not had the time to master Hebrew or find many friends in his adopted land, had gone by himself to the Mahane Yehuda fruit and vegetable market Wednesday.

He was in an alley when the two powerful bombs went off. Fifteen people died, including the two bombers. In a leaflet, the radical Islamic group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, although some authorities have cast doubt on the leaflet’s authenticity.

Following Jewish tradition, his parents wanted to bury him within 24 hours. The Maariv account said an official of the national insurance administration told Olga that according to official records, she and her son were both Christians, precluding a burial in the Jewish cemetery.

The official suggested she try the Mount of Olives, the newspaper said. At 2:30 p.m. Friday, hours before the Sabbath would begin at dusk, the family set out for that cemetery. But soon after they arrived, a priest appeared and insisted that he pray over the coffin.

The family objected, and the standoff ensued.

Burials in Israel have long been a source of controversy. Israel’s conservative rabbinate sets strict guidelines governing who may be buried as a Jew. The lack of burial options became more acute in the late 1980s when tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, many of mixed descent and not immediately accepted as Jews, began arriving.

Five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that cemeteries should be pluralistic to accommodate such people. Last year, the Knesset passed a law permitting the establishment of non-religious cemeteries for the first time.

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Implementation of that law was left to the Religious Affairs Ministry, which is controlled by ultra-religious political parties. Some secular Israelis suspect that the ministry is deliberately dragging its feet in setting up the non-religious burial places.

The ministry denies any such intention, saying the obstacle is financial. According to Mallka, the country’s total cemetery budget is only about $2.1 million--not enough for the ministry “to set up secularist cemeteries everywhere.”

Efrat Shvily of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.