To honor the dead: Berkeley Reform synagogue launches burial society

Marian Magid of Berkeley is very much alive. But for a few hours recently she agreed to play dead.

Magid served as a "training corpse" for a group of volunteers learning the Jewish way of the chevra kadishah (Hebrew for holy society, but more commonly translated as burial society).

Under Jewish law, the deceased are treated with the utmost respect. A body is washed, dressed in a shroud and kept company from the moment of death until burial.

In traditional Jewish communities, responsibility for these duties falls to the chevra kadishah. The job is considered among the most selfless of mitzvot because the dead cannot say "thank you."

It is common to find burial societies in Orthodox communities. But at Magid's Reform congregation in the East Bay, volunteers are lining up to join a newly formed chevra kadishah of their own.

Berkeley's Congregation Beth El is one of the few Reform synagogues in the Bay Area to have a chevra kadishah. Organizers say it's in keeping with the congregation's history of returning to Jewish tradition whenever possible.

"This has been percolating around Beth El for a while," says Dan Magid, the synagogue's ritual committee chairman and the son of Marian Magid. "Several members were interested in having a chevra kadishah to aid our congregants and let people know this service is available when they die."

The services include tehara (ritual washing of the body) and shmira (watching over the body) while reciting psalms and other blessings.

The Beth El chevra kadishah got started after Marian Magid and her husband volunteered to perform shmira for a friend who had died. The experience proved so powerful, she went back to the Beth El ritual committee to see about staring its own burial society.

No one on the committee expected the response they got: More than 30 people signed up. In short order, Rabbi Paula Marcus of Temple Beth El in Aptos invited a Berkeley contingent to receive training.

That included having volunteers like Marian Magid serve as stand-ins to allow chevra trainees hands-on experience before working with a real body.

Also offering to train the volunteers were members of the burial societies at Berkeley's Conservative Congregation Netivot Shalom and Oakland's Orthodox Beth Jacob Congregation.

"We have excellent relationships with non-Orthodox synagogues in the area," says Beth Jacob Rabbi Judah Dardik. "We're always happy to help train people in how to do a proper tehara."

Hundreds of volunteer burial societies now exist throughout North America. Some are multi-denominational because basic practice varies little between denominations and, in the case of smaller locales, because there are too few Jews to be picky.

In the past five to 10 years, religious leaders say, the number of non-Orthodox chevra kadishot has greatly expanded. Some 170 people from every stream of Judaism attended a recent chevra kadishah conference, hailing from 25 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces.

Richard Aptaker, an El Cerrito-based physician, is coordinator of Beth El men's tehara committee. Though raised in a Conservative home, he had not been familiar with chevra kadishah and found himself compelled to sign up. He's been called upon to perform two tehara ceremonies so far, though neither was for a Beth El member.

"In the opening procedure, you wash your hands three times and say a blessing in which you ask for forgiveness for any indignity the body may suffer at your hands," says Aptaker. "You say a blessing to praise God for his kindness and mercy, for treating the dead with kindness and respect and asking God to have mercy on the deceased."

After washing the body, blessings are recited, followed by a ritual washing of 24 quarts of water poured continuously. Then the body is dressed in a shroud of linen.

Says Aptaker: "Seeing the body dressed in white from head to toe with the tallit and the kippah, I got a moving feeling that the right thing was done in terms of treating this person with respect and honor. That made it worth it to me."

Though not on the tehara committee, Dan Magid can understand Aptaker's feelings. "As I started to research Jewish ritual," he says, "I realized how wonderful it was to have this structure around death so you don't have to worry about what to do, when people are bereaved and not thinking clearly."

Marian Magid sees this mitzvah as one of prime value, which is why she is glad that Congregation Beth El has its own burial society, even though she hopes it will rarely be called on.

Recounting the sages' commentary on chevra, she says, "If a man is on his way to his son's bris and he sees a body in the road, he must stop and care for it. It takes precedence over the bris. And if the high priest is on his way to Holy of Holies to pray for Jewish people on Yom Kippur, and he encounters a dead body, he must care for it. That's how important this is."