More in ‘burial’

When Tablet Magazine recently visited Isaac Pollak’s Manhattan apartment to look at his collection of Jewish funerary objects, the collector was in an unusually good position to talk about them. A longstanding member of his synagogue’s burial society, or chevra kadisha, he had been involved in the ritual purification of a body just hours before. ...

A three-year-old Israeli girl was strangled to death by her father earlier this year, and the nation was shocked—by the luridness of the crime, by the father’s subsequent suicide attempts, by the divorce-gone-bad story it emerged was behind the crime, and, not least, by the fuel the child’s mother poured on an ongoing battle between ...

The latest casualties of Jews’ oft-bemoaned failure to transmit the importance of “looking after our own” from one generation to the next: the dead. Once, according to The New York Times, American Jews, particularly in the Northeast, organized societies to oversee the care and burial of the deceased. Now the dissolution of many such groups—due, ...

The first thing that happened the morning after my brother Eric killed himself was my sister and I told our father. It was early in the morning so we let ourselves into his house where he had been living alone since our mother died five years earlier. He sat on the edge of the bed, ...