cemeteries aren’t creepy they’re actually devoted to memory and rest and love and humanity
They used to be a common place to spend the afternoon and have a picnic and stuff! We should bring this back imo.
As a kid my grandpa used to take me to the donut shop then the florist and we’d eat donuts in the cemetery while placing flowers on all the really old unkempt graves.
Our parish’s cemetery custodian just retired after decades of maintaining our loved ones’ resting grounds. I’ve been recruited by the new custodian to help restore and replace the roses at the Marian reflection garden.
I’ll be going out there this weekend to see how the roses have been growing, to do emergency pruning if necessary, and what treatments are needed. Keeping my community’s place of mourning and memory beautiful is an honor.
Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist (and also a Christian) was killed in the West Bank by the IDF a couple days ago. Her funeral is today and the IDF is apparently besieging even that.
“William E. Crossen, eighteen-months-old, son of Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Crossen, shown in a coffin at Joyce Funeral Home.” Photo by Arthur M. Vinje. Madison, Wisconsin; July 26, 1945. Source: Wisconsin Historical Society.
I’m writing a story and in the name of simple representation have decided to make the character Jewish. This is not a huge part of the story at all but I’m writing his funeral and I was wondering what traditional Jewish funerals look like?
I did some research and this is what I found about a gravesite funeral:
I was wondering how accurate this was? It’s not a huge thing but I want it to be there and accurate :)
Specific questions
Do people carry the casket to the grave or is it rolled there/does it not really matter?
What do others wear?
Are gifts/presents given to the person/family?
How many people would be part of the avelim? Would a very close partner be included or a best friend?
How many people would participate in the burying?
Thanks so much!
Hi! First of all, thanks; I appreciate your effort to provide accurate representation. :)
The information you found in your research is accurate to my experiences and knowledge. My attempts at answering your other questions are below (with the disclaimer that I’ve never actually formally studied this area of halachah — so if one of my Jewish followers is reading this and has something to add or correct, please feel free to jump in!)
Do people carry the casket to the grave or is it rolled there/does it not really matter?
Carrying or wheeling are both options, and I think I’ve seen both done. Caskets, when used, are very simple, mostly unornamented and made of wood (pine wood is traditional, I think?)
In fact, depending largely on location, a casket may not be used at all. (In the U.S. and some other countries, there usually is a casket — at least in part due to government regulations often requiring it — but in contrast, to my understanding, in Israel it is customary to simply bury them in their shroud, with no casket at all.)
What do others wear?
Depends a lot on the funeral and community. Dark colors are generally common, and you might see a mix of suits and less formal attire. But it varies, and there’s no strict, universal funeral-specific dress code.
Related to clothing, it is customary for immediate family mourners to make a tear in something they are wearing upon receiving news of their loved ones death. Sometimes, instead of damaging their real clothes, people will just clip a ribbon to their clothes and tear that as more of a symbolic gesture.
Are gifts/presents given to the person/family?
Not gifts as such, no. However, there is a week-long intensive mourning period after the funeral called sitting shiva, during which the immediate family mourners stay at home and their friends/family/community bring food and basically try to tend to their every need. By the time the week of shiva is over, people’s refrigerators are often pretty packed. Other than food, though, gift-giving isn’t really a thing.
It is also common to choose a cause/organization or multiple causes/organizations that were important to the individual and ask people to make donations in their name/memory.
How many people would be part of the avelim? Would a very close partner be included or a best friend?
Although translated as “mourner,” “avel” (singular of “avelim”) has a much more specific and clearly defined meaning than the English word. For purposes of Jewish law, the only avelim are the immediate family — parent, child, sibling, or spouse. Depending how many surviving family members the person had, that group could be small or large.
Of course, anyone (including non-immediate family and friends) can mourn in the informal sense of the term. But the prescribed obligations and practices of avelut apply only to immediate family.
How many people would participate in the burying?
As many people as are able to come to the funeral! Again, that could be a large or small gathering depending on the person. At least ten men aged thirteen or older do need to be present in order to constitute a minyan (the quorum needed in order to be able to perform some parts of the funeral service).
For the actual, physical burial, it is traditional for the funeral attendees to participate by hand, taking it in turns to shovel earth into the grave until the casket is fully covered. (Assisting in a burial is considered one of the greatest mitzvot a person can perform: offering a kindness that can never be repaid.)
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have followup questions or if anything I said makes no sense whatsoever. ;)
I will add that for less traditional sects we count women 13 or older for a minyan. The minyan is required for the shiva service (in my experience, usually made Absolutely Sure Of for evening services, but there’s an afternoon service too. Both of these take about 20 minutes for the actual set of prayers). This is because the minyan is specifically required for the Mourners Kaddish.
The Mourners Kaddish is also said on the anniversary of the person’s death by the Hebrew calendar, which is luni-solar.
Traditionally, the gravestone is unveiled 11 months after the person’s death, which is also the ending of the lesser mourning period where you can cook and work and such but you’re still saying Kaddish. Flowers are not given at the funeral or laid at the grave, we use stones instead.
You’re also supposed to wash your hands upon leaving the cemetary.
I think I might be coming from a different minhag than some of the previous commenters, because there’s a few bits where things are just slightly different from what I’m used to. For what it’s worth, I’m American and Ashkenazi; framework is more used to Orthodox funerals, but more used to Conservative shiva houses.
For moderately-traditional sects, we count women starting at 12, not 13.
A rabbi isn’t religiously necessary as an officiant, but officiating funerals is one of the duties of a congregational rabbi. Eulogies are common; it’s also not unusual for mourners to deliver them if they so wish.
I’m more used to seeing coffins carried -at least the final bit -but I’m also used to cemeteries where the soil type would be very difficult to roll anything across.
When burying, the shovel is supposed to be held with the blade upside down so you’re scooping with the convex side. It’s also not supposed to be passed hand to hand; instead it’s planted in the dirt pile between shovelings. It’s not unusual for the first bit of dirt to be from Israel; if so, it’ll be a very small amount. Everyone present lines up; the first few scoops are done by the immediate family. Generally speaking, it’s no more than 1-3 scoops per person at a time; there might be a repeats, and if there aren’t many people, it’s fairly normal for younger, able-bodied adults who weren’t especially close to the deceased to take over filling in the grave, but even then, shoveling in turns.
The avelim are never the last to leave the cemetery. Ever. I’ve been to several funerals where, when the family was ready to leave, people lined up in two rows facing each other as a sort of reception line to offer comfort.
The torn ribbons are called kriyah ribbons. For an example of what they look like, if you look up U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin’s speech on January 7th of 2021, you can see one on his lapel.
The handwashing note is accurate (and every Jewish cemetery I’ve been to has spigots or basins for that purpose at all the gates), but I’d like to note that that’s ritual handwashing. No soap; just the three pours over each hand. People having water bottles with them, especially for winter funerals when the plumbing might be disconnected or frozen is a bit of a thing.
If you’ve got a POV character who’s not Jewish and has never been to a Jewish funeral, make a note of the sound of the dirt hitting the coffin. There’s a dull thud when the dirt hits the coffin and then a sort of skittering-rattling noise as all the little pebbles and clumps shift across it, and every time I’ve been to a funeral, it’s been immediately obvious who’s not used to how we do things because they jump.
IME, there are superstitions among older people around very small children at funerals, but there are no prohibitions.
For pre-funeral stuff:
No viewing. No embalming. Body is to be buried as close to death as possible; any delay is to allow the family to get there.
The corpse is not left unattended. The chevra kedisha -sacred society -wash and dress the corpse. Burial clothing is all made from undyed plant fibers; usually linen. The whole body, including the face, is wrapped and covered. Some men in some communities will be buried in their kitels, as well as the normal burial garb. It’s also not unusual for someone to be buried with their tallit; if so, one of the fringes will be cut. While sitting with the corpse, it’s customary to read from Tehillim, or Psalms. Avelim may serve as shomrim -the, uh, body guards, for lack of a better word.
Once wrapped, the deceased is put in the coffin and the coffin is closed. The coffin is generally going to be the plainest thing allowed by law. Unadorned, no metal, and if possible, no lining.
So all of this is very good, but OP, I see a glaring omission here which, if you are trying to portray a Jewish character accurately, you should probably consider:
The funeral is not the center of the Jewish mourning process.
This is a place where cultural expectations around a thing (in this case, death) are just so wildly different that it’s almost hard to even see it – the very word funeral in English almost implies a level of centrality that is extremely absent from the Jewish view. So I’m going to just try and go down and try to rapid-fire unpack the two biggest areas of difference here – please feel free to ask for clarification either here or in a DM if you have additional questions.
1) The funeral is for the dead.
When we say that “the human body is the image of G-d” we mean that with an extremely different weight than Christians tend to. ANY disrespect to a human corpse is considered literally blasphemous, and we generally consider “not being placed in the ground, whole and intact, to rest forever, literally as quickly as is humanly possible” to be a type of disrespect. To put this into a bit of perspective, the Roman method of execution known as crucifixion was instituted in Judea in large part specifically in order to disrupt our funeral traditions.
We DO NOT display a corpse, ever – we DO NOT wait for days and days for relatives to fly in from out of town and all be together to “put someone to rest” – the funeral isn’t primarily for the mourners, it’s for the corpse, in a practical “get it into the ground immediately” sense. Ideally, the funeral should be held the literal next day following the death, unless that day is Shabbat or a holiday, in which case it would be ideally held the next day after that. This isn’t always how things work in practice, but understand that that is the intentionality we approach this with.
Burials themselves are comparatively short and to the point. Everyone adds their three scoops of dirt, and then, if there’s still burying left to do, the funeral home staff can complete it as needed. If people are hurting, they can get right back in line after they’ve added their three, as many times as they want – at funerals where the person was young, or the death was sudden, there can be a lot of cathartic digging and ugly crying as the people who are both physically able and mentally in need get back in line again and again and again and dig. Other times, everyone does their three, and then the funeral home takes care of the rest. But in either case, the entire process is focused, above all, on laying the corpse to rest – not talking about who they were in life, or comforting those who are mourning, though both of those things do happen as well. Eulogies are common, but they are generally brief.
2) Shiva is for the mourners.
In Christian traditions, burial is sort of the end of it – there’s a “mourning” period, but placing the coffin in the ground brings a certain sense of finality. Not so for us – burial is the start.
People, sometimes even fairly close family, often don’t make it out in time for the funeral in a Jewish context. But they do try and make it to the shiva. And this is vital, because during shiva, mourners are confined to their house – they don’t use mirrors or shave or wear make-up; they don’t even wear shoes. They can’t cook for themselves, or serve themselves food, or otherwise do almost literally anything other than just be – and as such, the community needs to provide for them, constantly, for the entire week.
The way this works looks something like this:
The mourners need a minyan – a quorum of ten – in order to to say their appropriate prayers as mourners, which they need to say at multiple times every day. As such, the house is always full of people. Everyone always brings food to a house of morning, and so in practice, the house is also always full of food. If you had any personal connection to the deceased or to any of the mourners, and you’re in the area, you swing by the house for prayers, at least once, and probably on and off throughout the week. If you were very close to the deceased or to the mourners, you probably stop by every day. You get together and your say your prayers… and then you mill around the place, make small talk with other people who are there, and nosh.
If a mourner feels moved, they might talk about the deceased – and if they do, you listen attentively, and talk about whatever it is that they would like to talk about. At some point, they might bring out the photos, or read from something the deceased wrote when they were alive, or share an anecdote or a song or anything else… and when that happens, whenever that happens, there will be people generally around, to listen, and to share in the memory, whatever it may be.
And sometimes, nothing like that happens. Sometimes, when you attend a shiva you end up just making awkward small talk with some guy you know from shul in a corner of the living room and eating some lox, and that’s fine. Because shiva isn’t for the memory of the deceased in an abstract sense – the deceased is already resting peacefully in the ground, and this is for the people closest to them who are actively remembering them. When you attend a shiva, your job is to just be there and present, such that, whatever comes bubbling up, and whenever that might be, the mourner is surrounded by an entire room full of people who care in that moment.
At the very end of the shiva, on the last day, the community brings the mourners to the door of their home, and helps them put on their shoes. Then, they walk with the mourners around the block, as the mourners symbolically return to their life and enter a period more akin to what Christians mean when they say that someone is “in a mourning period”. And then, after the community has walked around the block, said their goodbyes, packed up, and gone home? That’s when we have the moment of finality that Christian traditions typically place at burial.
To add on to this, since I wasn’t sure if OP was aware of the existence of shiva or not and just wanted to look at the question-as-asked.
There’sstages. The burial is for the deceased, but the ritualized everything else is for the mourners, and it’s… specific.
Stage one:
Pre-burial mourning. All religious “thou shalt” (as opposed to “thou shalt not”) obligations are temporarily suspended. Just handle the immediate burial arrangement requirements. For support-mourners, this isn’t the time to try and offer comfort; just be there.
Stage two:
Sitting shiva. penrosesun had a very good overview here. Mirrors are covered (reasons for this vary -my own minhag says that this is to avoid causing the lingering soul of the deceased any distress from seeing themselves wrong), in some communities, mourners who are able sit on low stools or the floor. I’m also familiar with the custom that in a shiva house, you do not speak to the mourner until they have spoken to you and set the tone of the conversation. Maybe they want to hear cheerful stories about their loved one; maybe they want to sit in silence. Their grief; their rules.
IME, there’s a general Thing where people kinda… automatically filter by how well they know the mourner personally. Close friends and relatives who are not mourners themselves will stick closer; people who knew the deceased well but aren’t as close to the survivors will stop by to exchange an anecdote, or a hug, or press hands or something and then move a bit further out. People who don’t really know the mourners all that well will often migrate to either the corners, for awkward small talk, or the kitchen to help with dishes, getting food sorted, etc. In a kosher home in a community with varied kashrut standards, there will usually be a neighbor or friend or cousin managing those people.
Stopping by to take care of chores and errands as well as just bring food or say hi is also very much a Thing. Working and handling business are very much no-gos during the shiva week, so having other people stop in for stuff like vacuuming and mowing the lawn helps. There are prohibitions around shaving, haircuts, bathing for pleasure (as opposed to necessity), having sex, buying new clothes, wearing freshly washed clothes (if all clothes are dirty, that last is not applicable), and listening to music/other forms of entertainment. The extent to which all of these are followed is community-dependent.
Stage three:
Shloshim. The first thirty days are… I guess mid-mourning? Most of the restrictions from the end of the last paragraph are still in effect, although bathing, having sex, and wearing just-washed clothes are back on the table. Attending weddings and b’nai mitzvah is generally a no-go -but they are not to be rescheduled. The mourner is still obligated in the daily memorial prayers, and will be for eleven months following the death, but they may leave the house and begin returning to normal life.
Stage four:
The first year (eleven months, depending on minhag). Traditionally, this is only for the loss of a parent (religiously considered the greatest bereavement), but in liberal communities, it’s commonly applied for any death in the immediate family. That’s not to say that it’s not done for immediate relatives in other communities; I’m limited by my own perspective here.
The entertainment restriction remains in effect, and the mourner is expected to be saying the mourner’s kaddish at daily prayers with a minyan. Ending this period with the unveiling is common, but the gravestone may be revealed at any point once the first thirty days have ended.
Additional note:
Since the question of body desecration came up, and I don’t know how your character died (also I saw the reblog that you’ve already published, and if you’ve got a link or a title, I’d like to read what you wrote, if you’re okay with that), I thought I’d address organ donation.
Short answer: it’s complicated. On the one hand, almost anything that can be done to preserve a life without endangering another must be done. On the other hand, not desecrating the body of the deceased is a huge thing. The Halachic Organ Donor Society is dedicated to providing explanation of details on the halacha of when it’s permitted (religiously speaking, what counts as death is a concern here) and what requirements and restrictions apply.
Reblogging once again with @terulakimban‘s tags because I agree:
