juneau, alaska | Grace Weinberg wanted her final resting place to be alongside her husband in Arizona.
But just before the 92-year-old widow died in 2003, her daughter, Sheryl, came up against a legal obstacle to granting her mother’s final wish.
Alaska public health law prohibits bodies from crossing state lines unless they have been embalmed. The Weinbergs are Jewish, and embalming defies their religious beliefs.
Sending Grace Weinberg to her final resting place nearly came down to a choice of breaking the laws of this world or adhering to those of the next.
But Sheryl Weinberg wants to make sure no family ever has to make the same choice so she’s trying to get the law changed.
Weinberg was 84 when she moved in with her daughter in Juneau in 1995. The elderly woman was an active member in the town’s small Jewish community and even led an aerobics class three days a week.
In spring 2003, her health had diminished and she and her daughter began to plan her funeral. Grace Weinberg’s final resting place was to be beside her late husband in Arizona. But when Sheryl met with a Juneau funeral director about transporting her mother to Phoenix, she got hit with the bureaucratic roadblock.
“We’re Jewish,” Weinberg said. “When I told him she couldn’t be embalmed, he told me that was impossible.”
Jewish tradition prohibits embalming because, according to rabbis and religious scholars, all the organs and fluids are sacred and must be buried with the body.
“We use the notion from dust to dust,” said Rabbi Edythe Menscher of the New York-based Union for Reform Judaism. “As you are created, so you return.”
Some other faiths, such as Islam, also prohibit embalming.
Sheryl Weinberg spent six weeks talking to state officials and medical examiners, trying to get a waiver to transport her mother’s remains. It was important the paperwork be in place because once Grace Weinberg died, Jewish law required her to be buried as quickly as possible.
“The fact that I had a roadblock almost first thing and had to secure this waiver, it was not something I relished, but I had to pursue it to the end,” her daughter said.
The waiver came through just weeks before Grace Weinberg died in August 2003. Her body was sent quickly to Phoenix, unembalmed.
Now, Sheryl Weinberg has taken her fight to Alaska’s Legislature, where she hopes to see the law struck down. She said she does not want other families to go through what she did as she prepared for her mother’s death.
The law that requires bodies be embalmed has been part of state public health regulations since Alaska was a territory.
“This could be an artifact from the time when the technology provided that dry ice would be packed on the body and be shipped on a freighter,” said state Sen. Kim Elton, a sponsor of a bill to change the law.
Elton and the other sponsors say technological advances and daily jet service have reduced the health concerns the law was meant to address. Allowing the law to stand now infringes on religious liberty, they say.
Deb Erickson of the state Department of Health said the issue rarely comes up in Alaska, where the Lubavitch Jewish Center estimates about 5,000 of the state’s population of nearly 650,000 are Jewish.
Erickson said she can remember two cases in the past two years when embalming waivers were requested.
“We haven’t hesitated to grant a waiver in the past when it’s due to religious services,” she said.