Lithuanian Woman’s Body Exhumed for Reburial in Chicago
Image by Chevra Kadisha
The body of a Lithuanian Jewish woman who died in Germany 78 years ago was exhumed for reburial next to her husband in Chicago.
Wednesday’s exhumation of the woman, whose family asked not to be named by the media, was a rare exception to Jewish religious laws that forbid disturbing graves under all but very special circumstances, Yehudah Teichtal, a rabbi of the Jewish Community of Berlin, told JTA. Teichtal oversaw the procedure.
The woman arrived in Germany from Lithuania in 1937 with her family en route to the United States but died in Berlin.
“The Nazis and Adolf Hitler were already in power, there was not time to wait around, so the family had to bury her in Berlin and move on,” said Teichtal, who prepared the woman’s coffin for shipment on Friday.
The woman’s husband was buried in 1941 in a double plot in Chicago in anticipation of his wife’s reburial there.
Based on precedents in the Shulchan Aruch, a code of Jewish law, the exhumation was conducted with special permission from Rabbi Yakov Ruza, a prominent authority in Israel on forensic medicine.
“It’s not a decision I took lightly,” Teichtal told JTA, “and it involved a lot of consultation in Jewish sources and an expert opinion.”
Teichtal said he was not aware of any exhumation from a Jewish cemetery in Berlin in recent decades. He added that it was also made possible partially because the woman expressed her desire before witnesses to be buried next to her husband and family before passing away.
“The relocation of the woman’s body was of extreme importance to the family,” Teichtal said. “They are very happy and relieved that this has been achieved after all these years.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
