VIDEOS
ARTICLES
BOOKS &
BROCHURES
Commentary
quotes
Videos
Lori Palatnik: Soul & the Afterlife: Where do we go from here?
Jewish Burial vs Cremation - What is the traditional Jewish perspective on cremation?
The Jewish Concept of the Afterlife & the Anguish of Cremation
Mindflex: Footprints of the Afterlife with Robin Meyerson
Q&A - Part 1 & Part 2
Mindflex: The Afterlife and The Dilemma of Cremation - Part 1 & Part 2
Cremation Or Burial? A Jewish View (Кремация или Захоронение? Еврейская точка зрения)
Robin Meyerson shares miracle stories from her book, ‘From This World to the Next’. (Audio)
The book is a compilation of moving narratives about traditional Jewish burial rituals and the afterlife. They speak to the delicate matter of burial and ensuring eternal life and peace for our loved ones who have gone before us. These inspiring and enlightening stories comfort the Jewish soul and deal with issues of faith and family, loss and love.
Cremation: A Jewish Perspective - Why this growing trend isn't a good idea
Why Jewish Burial?
Video for the Hearing Impaired
Cremation Process
WARNING! Disturbing images.
People think cremations are quick and clean. This video shows what actually happens.
Doron Kornbluth Presents on Cremation or Burial? A Jewish View
Books & Brochures
Pain is a Reality, Suffering is a ChoicE
Grappling with Divine Justice
Shares the Jewish wisdom on dealing with difficulties in life through the challenges the Resnicks went through with their daughter’s illness and untimely passing.
The Soul & The Afterlife
Jewish burial = green burial
Cremation or burial?
End of life information
Cremation hurts
Cremation or Burial?
A Jewish View
Articles
Jewish Burial: Sacred Kindness (Some explanations for the laws and customs of Jewish burial)
The Jewish View of Cremation: Death involves not just the body, but also the soul
ABCs of Death & Mourning: Coping with the emotional and spiritual issues of this difficult time
My 11 Months of Kaddish
How saying Kaddish for my father changed my life.
The Jewish View of Cremation
Death involves not just the body, but also the soul
Burning Issue
Israel's first crematorium opens for business. What would Moses say?
Care Package to Heaven
How to honor a parent who is no longer alive
commentary quotes
“O Man,
Whoever you are and from wherever you come
(for I know that you will come)
I am Cyrus,
and I won for the Persians their empire.
Do not, therefore, begrudge me
This little earth that covers my body.”
- Epitaph of Cyrus the Great (d. 529 BCE)
“Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.”
- William Gladstone, British Prime Minister, 1809–1898
And Sarah died in Kiryat-Arba … And Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her. And Abraham stood up from before his dead, and spoke to the children of Heth, saying, "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a burying place with you, that I may bury my dead …"
- Genesis 23:2–4
“Anyone dealing with a dead body must know that he is dealing with a sacred object: The body of a person is not simply a container for holiness, that served the holy soul, rather it itself became sacred … similar to a Torah scroll. During the life of a person, while his soul … is in it, [the body] is called a living Torah scroll (it is important a person not forget this, and be careful with his Torah scroll and those of his friends), and so, one who witnesses the moment of death of a person it is as if he is watching a Torah scroll burn… ”
- Rabbi Tucazinsky, Gesher HaChaim, 1:65
“The bodies of our newly dead are not debris, nor remnant ... They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.”
- Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 22
There is a certain irony in the scattering of ashes, given that at one time (in the mid-1800s) only the ashes of cremated criminals were scattered in order to show the severity of their criminal punishment. Scattering ashes ... began with "impious miscreants ... In order to destroy the memory of the past ..."
- Schmidt, Dust to Dust, 27
Americans are starting to accept, if not embrace, this fundamental fact of biology: that the natural end of all life is decomposition and decay. Instead of fighting it at almost all cost as we have for the better part of the last century — with toxic chemicals, bulletproof metal caskets, and the concrete bunker that is the burial vault, all of which will only delay, not halt, the inevitable — we're finally seeing the wisdom of allowing Mother Nature to run her natural course.
- Mark Harris, Grave Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (New York: Scribner, 2007), 186
Upon my buried body lay
Lightly, gently, earth.
- Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maid's Tragedy, ed. T. W. Craik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), II:i
[After] the moment of death ... we should get ... out of the way, with our bodies decently planted in the earth to nourish other forms of life — weeds, flowers, shrubs, trees, which support other forms of life, which support the ongoing human pageant — the lives of our children. That seems good enough to me.
- Edward Abbey in Bob Butz, Going Out Green: One Man's Adventure Planning His Own Natural Burial (Traverse City, MI: Spirituality & Health Books, 2009), 5
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins,
Covered in winter with violets and daisies.
It might make one in love with death, to think that one
should be buried in so sweet a place.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (Nabu Press, 2010), 57
A graveyard is an old agreement made
Between the living and the living who have died
That says we keep their names and dates alive.
This bridge connects our daily lives to them
And makes them, once our neighbors, neighbors once again.
- Lynch, The Undertaking, 121
I am convinced that if Christians in America and Europe could stand with me beside the "holy" River Bagmati in Kathmandu, Nepal, and observe the burning of the body of a Hindu following the performance of the Hindu death rituals, they would cast aside in repulsion every thought of cremation being ... acceptable ... Just five days ago I stood three or so feet from a burning corpse with a missionary pastor from Singapore and his wife who were visiting us. The head was already burnt beyond recognition and the skull split open due to internal expansion from the heat of the fire. The lower legs and feet were unscorched, as they were protruding from the pile of burning wood and stubble upon which the man's body lay. The professional Hindu burners were poking the body from time to time to keep the members in the fire and adding stubble and wood as needed. The bones were contracting and popping; the bodily organs were frying and the juices sizzling in the intense heat. My wife, a nurse with experience in a leprosy hospital and also in an intensive care ward, stood with another friend observing the ghastly sight from a distance, unwilling to come closer. The air for a hundred yards or more was filled with the unmistakable stench of burning flesh. When the fire had burnt most of the body, the ashes and remaining members were shoved into the river. This is cremation as has been practiced ... for untold centuries.
- David Cloud, "Cremation — What Does God Think?" Baptist Challenge, March 1989
"A crematorium should not be sited close to a neighborhood."
- Veerle Willaeys, Public Health Impact of Crematoria, Memorial Society of British Columbia
When a person dies, the soul or neshama hovers around the body. This neshama is the essence of the person, the consciousness and totality. Its thoughts, deeds, experiences and relationships. The body was its container, while it lasted, and the neshama, now on the way to the Eternal World, refuses to leave until the body is buried. In effect, the totality of the person who died continues to exist for a while in the vicinity of the body. A Jewish funeral is therefore most concerned with the feelings of the deceased, not only the feelings of the mourners. How we treat the body and how we behave around the body must reflect how we would act around the very person himself at this crucial moment.
It is no more surprising to be born twice than once;
Everything in nature is resurrection.
- Voltaire
PeacefulReturn.org is dedicated to sharing information about the importance and beauty of burial. People deserve honesty when making their very personal 'final decision.' Choosing burial or cremation is not easy. Unfortunately, the billion-dollar cremation industry has flooded the internet with misinformation. We hope, in our own way, to level the playing field and share facts about this deep and meaningful question. We are not-for-profit.