Painstaking, painful care for dead
PITTSBURGH — As the first funerals for the victims of the Pittsburgh massacre began, two rabbis and five other volunteers approached the sawhorses cordoning off the Tree of Life synagogue, and an FBI agent led them into the crime scene.
Inside the desecrated temple, the men donned white forensic coveralls, face masks and gloves, and set to work.
Judaism asks the living to take special care of the dead, and this group had a last, sacred duty to fulfil: gather up every drop of blood and other bodily traces of the 11 people killed in the deadliest attack against Jews in U.S. history.
“The Jewish law is that everything that belonged to the body needs to be buried, so we do our best,” one of the group’s leaders, Rabbi Elisar Admon, said Tuesday.
The work is meticulous and mentally taxing, carried out with implements as ordinary as wipes and paper towels.
Judaism is very specific about death and how it should be handled, whatever the circumstances.
When a loved one dies, religious law requires that representatives of the living accompany the body until burial.
In a ritual known as tahara, the remains are carefully washed and placed in a white shroud.
Jewish law mandates that the burial take place as soon as possible.
But the scale of the violence wreaked by a gunman Saturday has placed an extraordinary responsibility on those dedicated to this work, all volunteers.
The victims included one of their own, Jerry Rabinowitz, a doctor who had worked with the group in the past to prepare bodies for burial.
Recovering and preparing a body for burial are traditionally done by the local chapter of the burial society called Chevra Kadisha, led in Pittsburgh by an Orthodox rabbi, Daniel Wasserman.
He works alongside Admon, who, as a member of Israel-based Zaka International, spent many years in his home country recovering bodies at the scenes of accidents and terrorist attacks.
All those volunteering earn their living doing other jobs.