st. petersburg | Alexandra Kerzhenevich, a math teacher in her mid-50s and a lifelong resident of St. Petersburg, was never very religious but she has always felt a deep connection to her Jewish roots.
So when her father died last year, she wanted to bury him next to her mother in the family plot in the city’s Jewish cemetery.
Although the cemetery is run-down, severely crowded and overgrown with weeds, it is still the place in the city that is closest to her heart. “When I come to the cemetery, I feel at home — this is where all my people are,” Kerzhenevich said.
But like family plots in this and many other Russian cemeteries, the Kerzhenevich area is small and crowded with the graves of other family members.
Kerzhenivich was forced to make decision: In order to add her deceased father to the Jewish cemetery, she had to go against Jewish law and have his body cremated.
Her dilemma illustrates a nationwide problem. The practice of adding urns to family plots is common among both Jews and non-Jews in the overcrowded cemeteries of the former Soviet Union, but the issue has a special poignancy in the Jewish community. At a time when Jewish identity is on the rise, Russian Jews are becoming aware of the traditional prohibition against cremation but are unable or unwilling to comply.
Years of state-sponsored preference for cremation combined with financial considerations — it’s three times as expensive to bury a body than to cremate one in St. Petersburg — conspire to make it prohibitively difficult to bury the dead according to halachah, or Jewish law.
Kerzhenevich knew that to cremate her father’s body was a violation of Jewish law. But she said, “My father was not religious at all.”
Although she and her husband sporadically attend synagogue services, Judaism has always been more of a cultural identity to them. Their priority was to keep the family together — even in death.
Ironically, the widespread desire among Russian Jews to be buried with their families has led to increased cremation.
Rabbi Menahem Mendel Pevzner, the chief rabbi of St. Petersburg, is very concerned about the cremation issue, calling it “one of the main problems that the Jewish community in Russia is facing today.”
Explaining that Russian Jews used to cremate their dead “because it was cheaper,” he says that now it’s primarily due to families putting a priority on burying their dead together rather than following Jewish law. That, he says, is wrong: It is extremely important to observe Jewish burial laws, even if it means going against the wishes of the deceased.