Intermarriage issues don't end with death

By Toshio Suzuki

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With intermarriage rates steadily rising among Jews, more families are aware of the potential road bumps a shared lifetime with mixed heritages can create.
A small symposium during the second day of the North American Jewish Cemetery and Hevra Kadisha Conference established that the dilemma of a Jewish intermarriage does not necessarily cease with the passing of a loved one.
About 30 attendees sat in a small banquet room to hear Rabbi Stuart Kelman from Congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, Calif., offer his suggestions and examples of how cemetery staff and lay professionals from around the world are handling the sensitive issue of proper Jewish burials for intermarried couples and their families.
From the outset, participants were eager to solicit answers for their personal congregation's situation, but Kelman cautiously noted he had no definitive answers, using a preface to acknowledge he is a Conservative rabbi with "a really narrow perspective."
"We have about 90 percent intermarried couples in our congregation," said Helen Sizemore from congregation Kol Ha Emek, which is north of San Francisco.

"What are we going to do with these people?" lamented another woman, referring to all intermarried couples and her own daughter.
Mike Goldstein took a 90-minute ferry ride from Victoria, Canada, and then drove the remaining five hours to represent Emanu-El Congregation. Goldstein said his community is facing increasing pressure to make the lone Jewish cemetery in town, which was established in 1859, open to intermarried couples.
Portland has a disproportionately high number of congregations and 11 Jewish cemeteries, six of which allow intermarriage burials, unlike Goldstein's predicament of an Orthodox-run cemetery that is "basically the only show in town," he said.
In most instances, Kelman said, a congregation is going to elect a rabbi to make those difficult decisions on what to allow. However, there are variables that can make interpretation of Jewish law difficult for certain congregations or communities. When this happens, Kelman and his fellow clergy in the Bay Area use more delicate interpretations of what a Jewish cemetery is and what it means to be a non-Jew.
"I think identity is an extraordinarily tricky question," Kelman said of non-Jews. "In these days, the notion of a household is not monolithic. ? When we use the term non-Jew we're describing that person by what they're not."
Kelman practices the belief that not all non-Jews are the same and that some who are involved in their partner's faith, and not a different one of their own, deserve a separate classification.
As far as his perception of Jewish cemeteries, Kelman used the example of an IDF soldier that died while serving and was buried outside a Jewish cemetery because he or she was a Russian immigrant and not halachically Jewish. He said the public outcry soon forced the local rabbis to move the soldier's remains within the cemetery walls.
Kelman also said there is nothing that states a cemetery must have multiple burial plots, suggesting a proper concrete lining, mandatory in some states, can create an individual cemetery for a non-Jew that does not "desecrate the sanctity" of the surrounding Jewish cemetery.
"What I find is, that the more outside Orthodoxy you are the more you have to follow your heart and be compassionate," said Sizemore. "We're going to do what's best for us."