Dead must follow settlers out of Gaza

At an emotional ceremony two weeks ago, Bryna Hilberg described a phone call from the grave _ a conversation with her soldier son killed during Israel's occupation of Lebanon and now buried in the tiny cemetery here.

"Mama, who are these soldiers standing by my grave? What are they doing?

Mama, they are starting to take down my headstone! They are breaking the darkness shovel after shovel, the sun is penetrating inside.

Now they are picking up my legs, my hands, my side.

Mama, tell them to get away from me!"

Though imaginary, Hilberg's call from her dead son Yohanon was inspired by a sad, traumatic reality: Once the living are gone from the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, the dead will move, too. Israeli soldiers with backhoes will smash open the concrete and marble tombs, and volunteers from Chevra Kaddisha, a Jewish holy society, will ensure the bodies are unearthed and reburied in their new locations in accord with Jewish law and custom.

The reason for the disinterments? Fears that Palestinians, who will soon take control of Jewish-occupied land in Gaza, would desecrate Jewish graves.

"No one is under any delusion with respect to the villainy of our enemies," said Rabbi Chaim Eisen of the Orthodox Union Israel Center in Jerusalem. During the 1948 Mideast War, he noted, Jordanian soldiers built a road over an ancient Jewish cemetery on Jerusalem's Mount of Olives and used the marble headstones to build latrines.

The only Jewish graveyard in Gaza opened a few years after Israel began encouraging Jews to settle on this once barren coastal strip captured from Egypt during the 1967 Mideast War. Today there are 56 graves, including those of soldiers like Hilberg and victims of Palestinian terror attacks.

The surge in Palestinian violence between 2000 and last year is among the reasons the Israeli government has ordered the evacuation of all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon determined that the cost of protecting the area's 8,500 Jews from the 1.3-million Palestinians had grown too high in both human and financial terms.

Settlers had a deadline of midnight Tuesday to leave peacefully, but the complete evacuation is expected to take several more days because of resistance and the difficulty of moving so many people in a relatively short time. It likely will be September before the dead leave Gaza, though no date has been set.

With many settlers still hoping for a miracle to halt the pullout, only some of the families with relatives buried here have specified where they want their loved ones to go, said Chaim Gibber, a Gaza resident and member of the Chevra Kaddisha Society. The vast majority are expected to be taken to graveyards inside Israel.

Whether relatives will attend the exhumations is also uncertain. Gibber said: "My personal view is that the grief would be too much."

Religious law forbids the reburial of Jews except in extraordinary circumstances. Before death, an individual can stipulate where he or she wants to be permanently laid to rest: Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, originally was buried in Vienna but in accord with his wishes was reinterred in Israel after it became a nation in 1948.

Jews can also be reburied when, as in the Gaza case, their graves are likely to be destroyed because of man-made or natural reasons; the latter might include the rerouting of a river that could flood a graveyard.

The correct procedures for burying _ and reburying _ Jews are tightly prescribed by law and custom, with priority on respecting the body as "the receptacle of the God-given immortal soul," Eisen said.

For that reason, Jews in Israel are traditionally buried without a coffin so _ as stated in Ecclesiastes _ "the dust will return upon the earth as it was." Two exceptions: Israeli soldiers on active duty and victims of terror attacks or other violent forms of death.

"Sometimes there's a practical need to use a coffin because there isn't always a lot to bury," Eisen said. "In military funerals, there's also an across-the-board rule that members of the fallen soldier's unit carry the coffin so the family will be spared the anguish of realizing the coffin is unnaturally light."

Before burial, the body is washed by members of Chevra Kaddisha and wrapped nude in a shroud and, occasionally, a prayer shawl. Again, an exception: A person who dies violently or is killed because of religious beliefs is buried in the clothing worn at the time of death.

That's because Jewish law requires as much of the body as possible to be buried. Blood _ an integral part of the body _ may have soaked into the clothing.

One reason many Gaza settlers may decide not to watch loved ones being disinterred is because it is apt to be a disturbing, gruesome process: heavy equipment smashing tombs, bodies showing signs of decomposition.

Closely supervising the exhumations will be Chevra Kaddisha members, who will recite prayers and psalms as they place shrouded bodies in simple wooden coffins. They also will accompany the body to its next resting place.

In contrast to the original burial, which is followed by at least seven days of mourning, known as sitting shiva, "the thrust would be not to overburden mourners to have to go through this all again," said Phil Chernofsky of the Orthodox Union. "It probably will be limited to token mourning."

That could include relatives sitting quietly for a few moments at the new grave or reciting parts of Psalm 119, whose 176 verses are alphabetized so they can be used to spell the name of the deceased.

Mourners might also remove their leather shoes: By custom, Jews don't wear leather while mourning because "it isolates an individual from his environment," Chernofsky said, and hampers reconnection with the earth.

For Jewish settlers like Bryna Hilberg, exhuming their dead is one more tragedy of Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

"My son was killed for his country," Hilberg said as hundreds wept while she recounted her imaginary phone conversation. "Now my country wants to kill him again."

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susansptimes.com

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The forced evacuation of all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza was to begin at dawn today. At 12:01 this morning, soldiers began going door-to-door and warning residents by loudspeaker that the midnight deadline for voluntary evacuation had arrived. STORY, 13A

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