MK (Yesh Atid) Yoel Rozbozov has submitted a bill seeking to correct an injustice as he sees it. According to the current state law, when one’s spouse or other family members are not halachically Jewish, they may not be buried in a Jewish cemetery. He hopes to change this. In his very own family, his mother, Irene is Jewish but his father, Anatoly, is not and the MK wants to make sure his father can be interred alongside his mother.

The bill was on the agenda of the Knesset Law Committee on Sunday, 9 Adar I 5774. If the bill is approved and subsequently passed into law in Knesset, responsibility for kvura in Israel will be taken from the Ministry of Religious Services and placed in the hands of the Ministry of the Interior. The language of the bill compels the Interior Ministry to amend regulations to permit citizens of the State of Israel to be buried where they choose. This must be done within 180 days of passage of the bill.

In actuality, a law was passed in 1996 to accommodate alternative civilian burial but nothing was done. No land was set aside and a beis chaim was not opened in cities around the country as was to occur. This was intended to accommodate mixed families, so those wishing to be buried alongside one another could have this wish fulfilled. Rozbozov is confident that if the authority is placed in the Interior Ministry, the establishment of the alternative burial locations will be significantly expedited.

“The situation is that couples who lived their entire lives together, endured anti-Semitism, find out that davka in Israel they are not good enough” the MK explained. “If they cannot have a bris, and they cannot marry, at the very least permit them to die in peace as they wish. I am calling to bring an end to this discrimination against citizens of the state who happen to be part of a religion that is not 100% Jewish. This compels families to pay privately for burial in another city instead of being able to take advance of local free burial which every citizen is entitled to. This places a huge financial burden on families.”

He remains us of Emanuel Diamante, who arrived in Israel from the Former Soviet Union in 1971 with his non-Jewish wife. He served in the IDF but when his wife died, he never thought of contacting the chevra kadisha. To his good fortune, an alternative cemetery opened in his city, Kfar Saba. “This reality simply shows how the parasite group [read chareidim] controls the lives of citizens” he concluded.

(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)