The Fenced Grave

Religion may be a comfort, but Schmuel Steinberg, like many a man before him, knows that this is not necessarily so. Being Jewish in German-occupied Poland cost his wife and three children their lives in a Nazi gas chamber. Schmuel escaped to Russia, married a Christian girl and after the war brought her back to Poland. They had two sons, but Polish anti-Semitism eventually sent the Steinbergs off to Israel.

They settled down in the Israeli citrus town of Pardes Hanna on the plain of Sharon. Last month, on a trip to Haifa, Schmuel and Lubar Steinberg's five-year-old son Aharon came down with polio and died. They went to a local rabbi for a funeral, but he refused to bury the boy because Aharon, as the son of a non-Jewish mother, was technically not a Jew. In desperation the Steinbergs turned to a Roman Catholic priest, but he too refused burial on the ground that the boy had not been baptized.

Racial Purity? With their dead child bundled in linen wrappings on the seat of a taxi, the Steinbergs drove back home to Pardes Hanna and applied to the rabbis there. Again the answer was no. After days of wrangling, the rabbi agreed that Aharon could be buried inside the Jewish cemetery but stipulated that a special fence must separate his grave from the others, that no prayers be said at the graveside, and that Steinberg must not intone the mourner's Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for his son. Said Lubar, as she watched the gravediggers silently spading earth over the small coffin: "In Poland they discriminated against us as Jews; in Israel they discriminate against us as Christians."

A few nights later, the fence separating Aharon's grave from the others was mysteriously moved, but meanwhile the case had become a spark to the highly inflammable relations between religious and secularist Israelis. By law, Israel's rabbinate controls all matters of marriage, divorce and burial; e.g., no Cohen* may marry a divorced woman, an unmarried man must marry his brother's widow unless he releases her from the obligation by spitting at her ceremonially three times, mixed marriages are banned. Last week the question of Aharon's burial flared in the Knesset. Since Jews were the separate chosen people, argued the Orthodox faction, there was no choice but to keep them separate from non-Jews, even in death. For the same reason mixed marriages must be prevented, cried Knesset Member Yaakov Katz: "The precept of purity of race tells us intermarriage represents a danger to the Jewish people."

Freedom or Covenant? The non-Orthodox were horrified. "Nazi!" shouted some of them, and Katz withdrew his words. "You are playing a dangerous game," said Mapai (Labor) Member David Bar Rav, pointing at the Orthodox benches. "There are many laws which have become petrified, and if men of traditional law cannot determine the law in accordance with life, then life will eventually pass the traditionalists by."

In an open letter to Lubar Steinberg, the first serious writing he had ever published, Israel's leading humorist, Ephraim Kishon, said that "this nightmare of yours is shared by many of us." Editorialized the daily Haaretz: "The basic question is whether Israel is a state of free citizens whose rights are equal without discrimination of race, or whether it is the preserve only of those who have entered the covenant of our father Abraham. The answer of the rabbinate and the religious parties is unequivocal. The fence that separated Aharon Steinberg from the other dead of Pardes Hanna symbolizes an outlook: that all those who are not Jews have their place outside the fence and don't belong to us alive or dead. This is not the view of the majority, and the majority are not prepared to accept this verdict."

* The oldest Jewish family name, stemming from the priestly family (kohanim), which is traditionally descended from Aaron, the first high priest and brother of Moses.

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