Where Shall I bury my loved one?

Shay Talia and Katzenelson Mark

Ariel University Center in Samaria

Recently I have been studying an isolated cemetery in the north of

Israel. My study is based on visual analysis of gravestone, as well as on
in depth interviews with the relatives of the deceased. Although the
territory formally belongs to a church, I stumbled upon this cemetery by
chance while on a walking excursion at springtime a few years ago. We
were walking along a dirt road and all a sudden we saw a man lowering a
corpse from a pickup van and interring it in a pit he had made with a
shovel. It was his mother, he said, whom he could not bury anywhere
else, as she was not Jewish. We looked around and we saw few other
burial sites around, mainly of pilgrims and few foreign workers. Being
stunned by this event, I decided to follow up the story of this burial
place. Today the cemetery includes about 100 burial sites, mostly of
former Russian immigrants who had come to Israel with the great
immigration wave of the 90s. About a million people had come. In their
homeland, their Jewishness depended on their descent, marital status and
common history. The local population in former Russia, as was explained
to us by a few interviews made in Belarus, had regarded the departure of
these Jews to Israel as a return to their historic homeland - to the place
to which they belong. However, although considered by their former
society and by themselves as Jews, the State of Israel has denied from
300.000 of them the status of Jews. As a result, though receiving money
for burial arrangements from social security, they cannot use public
cemeteries like other Jewish citizens.
The tombs, which we studied meticulously, show an interesting
mingles. Russian traits - such as photographs of the deceased mounted on
black marble, plastic flowers, Pravoslav crosses, inscriptions of typical
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Russian phrases, a low balustrade around the tombs as was common in

communist Russia, and remains of Russian rituals for the Day of the
Dead, appear side by side with Jewish-Israeli traits. These include, for
example, deposition of fieldstones on the grave, Hebrew inscription
sometimes with religious significance or with Jewish symbols like the
David Star, ritual memorial candles and natural flowers.
At first, it seemed to me that the occupants of this cemetery by
acquiring Jewish-Israeli traits had undergone a process of assimilation in
comparison to other cemeteries containing former USSR immigrants that
I had researched before. However, the people we talked to were bitter
against the State, which they found responsible for the neglect of the
burial ground. Their anger appeared to express their all-encompassing
experience as immigrants, unwanted and rejected by society.
We talked to L, a beautiful former Yakutian folk-dancer in a highly
esteemed Siberian dance group who considered her harsh situation as
inevitable if one wanted to go on living and raising kids in a new country.
We talked to A (a Jew) and her family who had appealed to the
authorities in vain for help with the cemetery. The authorities, she said,
had turned a deaf ear and had rejected their demand in a threatening
manner.
B (a Christian) had been murdered in Tel Aviv a year and a half after
coming to Israel. His body was transferred to this remote and neglected
cemetery against the wish of his relatives, and nobody, they said, had ever
inquired into his murder. M is an engineer and a Jew. His son, however,
who had served in the Israeli army, could not be buried in a well-kept
public cemetery because the mother was non-Jew. It is so shameful,
says the father that although I am Jew, I dont feel Israeli anymore and I
dont mind trampling on the Israeli flag. The relatives frustration and
anger affect their attitude to the cemetery, which is the legal property of
the church. They requisition as much land as they wish for the burials on
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which they build enormous stone tombs, benches, fences and gardens. In
general these relatives invest endless efforts in the graves of their loved
ones, visit them often and even brush the dust from the tombs.
Furthermore, they have started a social network among themselves
regarding the maintenance of the cemetery. There is one person, formerly
a scientist, who takes care of the greenery; the engineer handles the
masonry of the tombs and yet another person provides information
regarding religious services, etc.
To conclude - although the tombs exhibit some formal Jewish-Israeli
traits, the interviewees have a permanent conflict with Israeli society that
decide for them what is legitimate and what is illegitimate. As a result
they adopt an attitude of extreme stubbornness like M, for instance, or of
extreme perseverance like the former dancer. The children of these
immigrants, like my collaborator, for instance, are more aware of the
Israeli reality, and suffer less from the effects of the immigration
experience. The older generation, however, whether dead or alive, has no
significance in their eyes or those of others in society, and thus they seem
to compensate themselves for the lost of the communitarian world they
once belonged to, and create an imaginary community which unite them
with the dead. For a year I observed the enormous effort that A, M, L and
others put in the graves of their loved ones. It made me very emotional
toward them and their loved ones and taught me a lot about love and care
to our kinsmen. My collaborator, Mr. Katzenelson, a former immigrant
himself from Belarus, now about 30 years old, feels anger at the
authorities that disregard this old generation of immigrants. Furthermore,
as a Jew, he is ashamed of the States attitude toward what people
consider non-Jews. I am pleased, he says, to participate in this study
of the people I understand and feel close to.