Rest in Peace in the Holy City: Jerusalem Municipality Agrees to Set Up Pluralistic Cemetery

February 5, 2008

The Jerusalem Municipality's Planning and Building Committee last week approved the establishment of the city's first-ever non-Orthodox Jewish cemetery. The new cemetery will be run by veteran NIF grantee Association for Eternal Rest – Menucha Nechona, and will be located within a new extension of the Har Hamenuhot Cemetery in the Givat Shaul neighborhood.

For many years, the Association for Eternal Rest has campaigned successfully for pluralistic burial options throughout Israel. The absence of non-Orthodox Jewish cemeteries in Israeli cities means that interfaith couples must be buried apart, while Conservative and Reform Jews cannot conduct funerals according to their rites.

The decision by the Jerusalem Municipality follows a Supreme Court order to the Israeli government a decade ago to provide pluralistic options. Thanks to the efforts of the Association for Eternal Rest, which is funded solely by NIF, non-Orthodox cemeteries are already operating in Beer Sheva and Haifa and are in the process of being established in Kfar Saba and Petach Tikvah.

Following the decision in Jerusalem, the city's ultra-Orthodox mayor Uri Lupolianski said, "Jerusalem is a pluralistic city that has a duty to allow people to choose their way of life and their burial, with no coercion of any kind."

Photo from Israel's first-ever funeral in 1999 in Israel's first-ever non-Orthodox Jewish cemetery in Beer Sheva

"I have personally met with Mayor Lupolianski four times in recent years on this topic," Miryam Kunda, General Manager of the Association for Eternal Rest told NIF News. "He had promised to respect the Supreme Court ruling but always had excuses. We kept the pressure on him until he ran out of excuses."

Israel's Orthodox Burial Societies, which until the campaign launched by the Association for Eternal Rest had a monopoly on Jewish cemeteries in Israel's cities, always allocated sections of cemeteries for non-Jews. But they insisted that Jews could not be buried in the non-Jewish cemetery.

This problem was aggravated after the mass immigration from the Soviet Union in the 1990s in which there were thousands of mixed couples.

Typical victims of this situation are Vladimir and Larissa (names have been changed), an elderly couple from Russia who immigrated to Israel in 1991. The couple settled in Jerusalem and after 58 years of marriage, Larissa died a decade ago. She was Jewish and was buried in the Har Menuchot Cemetery. Vladimir passed away several years ago but because he was not Jewish, he was buried half a mile away in the cemetery's non-Jewish section. Larissa, as a Jew, could not have been buried in the non-Jewish section. For about $10,000 the couple could have been buried together at a kibbutz cemetery. But neither the couple nor their son Grigory had that sort of money.

"My parents loved each other and together survived the Stalin purges and the Holocaust," said Grigory. "But the lack of appropriate cemeteries in Israel separated them."

After its victory in Jerusalem, the Association for Eternal Rest is targeting Tel Aviv, which is stubbornly refusing to allocate land for a non-Orthodox Jewish cemetery. The Supreme Court is considering a petition on the matter.