The Centre for Natural Burial

By Marisa, Jewish Life, Environment (blog)

I honestly can’t remember now what I was searching for online when I first stumbled on this website. I’d never heard of Green Burial before, but being an environmentalist as well as someone who believes in planning ahead, I was intrigued. By the time I’d finished reading through all of the very extensive information on the site, I was fascinated and more than a little excited.

When my grandmother died two years ago, she was buried at the New Montefiore Cemetery on Long Island, next to my grandpa and his parents. The family plot is part of a larger community plot that my grandparents and their friends bought all at the same time. It’s a favorite story among the families involved that when they first bought the land, sometime in the early 1940’s, they all went and had a huge picnic at that spot, with music and food and softball, so that every funeral would feel a little bit like coming home.

But three generations have nearly filled up the space; there’s room for my parents, but not for me or my generation. So I’ve been thinking for the last two years about where I might want to be buried when the time comes, since the family picnic ran out of room.

And I certainly don’t want a whole lot of fuss. The lovely funeral for my grandma was simple - she was buried in one of her favorite dresses, which she always wore when travelling, in a plain wooden casket. We had a short service at graveside with just our closest friends and our tiny family, and afterward my mom and I sang “Bei Mir Bist Du Shoen” as we led everyone in beginning to fill grandma’s grave.

I want something just as simple, if not even more so. Honestly, the idea of a polished, padded casket has always seemed ridiculous to me; they’re so expensive, and so unnecessary. I would much prefer to be buried in a simple box, or just wrapped in my tallis. And I’m glad to see that there’s at least one place that would accomodate this in New York.

A green burial sounds perfect to me; being buried in the woods, without a coffin, in a way that doesn’t waste any resources. But I worried about the halakha - could an authentically green burial also be authentically Jewish? I first consulted my well-worn copy of Maurice Lamm’s excellent book “The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning,” and confirmed that many of the green burial basics are also Jewish practice; for example, no embalming, and using the simplest possible casket. But what about the land itself? A cemetery is “Jewish” if the land is reserved for Jews only… so it would certainly be possible to have a green, Jewish cemetery, but so far this doesn’t exist.

Honestly, I think that this isn’t outside the realm of possibility. The environmental benefits are enormous - first of all, maintaining acres of forest takes much less work than maintaining acres of manicured lawns, resulting in fewer lawnmowers using less gasoline and creating emissions. Also, a green cemetery preserves established ecosystems rather than tearing out natural plants in order to plant cookie-cutter evergreens. And I like the idea of having natural, flat stones as gravemarkers, instead of massive, polished tombstones crowding each other.

By the time my grandmother died, her instructions had been ready and her preparations in place for years - which made things much easier for the rest of us in the days following her death. I’d like to be just as prepared as my grandmother. I’m going to be researching this more as they make progress on the site in New York, and hoping to see people in more states getting together to create these wonderful places.

Source - http://jvoices.com