Background to burial of woman with no family

▶ THE TORAH mandates us to bury our dead as soon as possible. The Talmud teaches us that if a body is found unattended, it has the status of a meit mitzvah and must be buried immediately. Many other commandments can be set aside temporarily in order to make arrangements for the funeral.

The London Beth Din is regularly asked questions of Jewish status (birur yahadut) and we carry out complex genealogical research which can span centuries and continents.

In a situation where a person has died, we would need to find people who could testify for them, or rely on other forms of evidence.

Nobody appeared to know Gloria Starr. A passing comment by a hospital worker to Rabbi Ari Cohen suggested she was Jewish. If true, this would be a meit mitzvah and we would have an obligation to bury her promptly in a Jewish cemetery.

Further investigation was needed to confirm her Jewish status. Genealogical research enabled Rabbi Cohen to locate her American birth certificate. This revealed her mother’s name, Lilian Novins. She appeared in three censuses — 1915, 1925 and 1940.

In each census, Lilian Novins was living with her parents, Rebecca and Meyer Novins. They lived in a Jewish Brooklyn tenement block. They were buried in a Jewish cemetery in New York.We can rely on this type of profiling for Jewish status for burial purposes.

It was only thanks to the persistence of Rabbi Cohen, supported by Rabbi Stanley Coten, our senior hospital chaplain, and my colleagues on the London Beth Din that we were able to make sure Ms Starr received the dignified Jewish burial she deserved.