In a fascinating article in The Forward, Julie Masis writes about a trend in Jewish cemeteries in the United States — gravestones are being forbidden for the low-income deceased as Jewish burial groups cut back.
“It is a matter of fairness,” she quotes Stan Kaplan, executive director of the Jewish Cemetery Association of Massachusetts, the largest Jewish cemetery association in North America, as saying.
The association provides discounted funerals for any deceased person who died on Medicaid, a program for those with few assets.
Citing its own costs for these funerals, the association recently changed its regulations to prohibit such individuals from getting a traditional upright gravestone on their graves. The prohibition holds firm even if the deceased person’s family wants to buy the gravestone out of pocket. Instead, the cemetery provides them with just a flat marker — a small flat stone, which has room for some words, though not as much as a gravestone would. In winter, a flat marker may not be visible under the snow.
A flat marker costs about $500, while the price of an upright stone starts at around $2,000.
“Our feeling is if they can afford an upright monument, then they can afford to pay for the services that were donated to them,” Kaplan said.
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Masis states that there are similar regulations in Miami and San Francisco, and in “some parts of the country, the graves of poor Jews have no stones at all.” In addition, she writes, in Massachusetts, people who have “discounted funerals” may not have an obituary in the newspaper, and must be buried in “the cheapest caskets.”
Masis notes that these regulations are “deeply disturbing” to “many of those who work in today’s funeral industry” — including religious leaders.
Gravestones are a long-standing Jewish tradition that goes back to the Bible. In the book of Genesis, for example,
Jacob marked Rachel’s grave when she died by the side of the road.
Marking the exact spot where someone is buried is important because “if we stand 2 feet to the right, we might be praying at the wrong person’s grave,” said Rabbi Nechemia Schusterman of Chabad of Peabody Jewish Center, in Peabody, Massachusetts.
Gravestones are, in a sense, connected to what it means to be Jewish, said Reform and Reconstructionist rabbi Joe Blair, from Harrisonburg, Virginia.
“Part of what makes Jews — Jews is that we maintain memory,” he said.
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1 comment on “Is this Trending? A cemetery class system?”
Not that surprising,even after death something must indicate differences in wealth during lifetime.
Immaterial differences such as having been a Mensch cann’t be expressed in and by stone!
The differences between Aschkenaziem and Sephardim easy to trace in history,such as the hierarchy by professions and … power.
The fact as such hurts your nesjomme …..