In Moscow, a Jewish funeral home has opened for the first time in the CIS. This is a place where burial services will be carried out in full accordance with Jewish law and tradition.
For many years, the Chevra Kadisha Burial Society has been operating out of the Shaarei Tsedek Charity Center in Moscow. The Chevra Kadisha will now have its own facilities.
In the past, the Chevra Kadisha volunteers prepared the deceased for its final journey at the Vostryakovskoe Jewish cemetery (located west of Moscow) and the Malakhovka cemetery (eastern suburbs). Now, the ritual purification and dressing of the body in tachrichim (shrouds) will be done at the new Funeral Home.
The Jewish Funeral Home is housed in a local clinic in the Marina Roscha neighborhood of Moscow, in close proximity to the Moscow Jewish Community Center. The clinic has allocated space in its morgue and a room for the tahara (ritual washing of the body) and donning the tachrichim (shrouds). There is also a separate room where relatives may bid farewell to the deceased. The equipment required for all of these basic and important Jewish rituals has already been purchased.
The opening of the Jewish funeral home makes it possible for the Moscow Chevra Kadisha to offer a new level of services, from collecting the necessary documents right through to the actual burial at a Jewish cemetery.
Yuri Berezovsky, the head of the Clinic’s pathology department, played a tremendous role in organizing and implementing the project to create the Jewish Funeral Home, which has (unfortunately) already begun operating.