Lawsuit Charges Cemetery With Unauthorized Reburial of Man

Two months after his father died, Peter Mazis was tormented by horrible dreams. At night, he would envision his father calling to him, reaching out to embrace him from an open grave.

Shaken, Mazis sought peace at the grave site where his father had been carefully buried according to Orthodox Jewish tradition--only to find the ground leveled and his father’s marker gone.

“I thought maybe I was crazy,” said Mazis, 51, a Northridge contractor. “I saw the grave and I knew he had been there.”

Then he looked over at the next row of plots, where freshly overturned dirt covered a new grave bearing his father’s name.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” he said.

After much persistence, Mazis said, he discovered that Home of Peace Memorial Park and Mausoleum--the oldest Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles--had moved his father’s body. A cemetery official, he said, told him that the move was necessary because his father had been buried accidentally in the wrong plot.

No one in his family had been told.

At the heart of the issue, the family says, is an unthinkable act that may have violated the sanctity of Orthodox Jewish law, as well as state regulations regarding burials.

Outraged, he and his family have sued the cemetery in East Los Angeles and Wilshire Boulevard Temple, which operates the memorial park, for $5.25 million.

“Me, my close family members--we are all shocked,” Mazis said. “I don’t know what happened to my dad in the new grave. I cannot take memories of this out of my mind. It’s following me, even today.”

Temple officials called the incident “a misunderstanding.”

“It was a mistake that, according to both cemetery and Jewish law, is the kind of error that can be corrected,” said Steve Breuer, executive director of Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the oldest Jewish congregation in Los Angeles. “We did what we could to rectify it. We’re very unhappy about it . . . but it is not sacrilegious to make that kind of error.”

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But state law say bodies cannot be moved without permission from the family and a court order, according to a spokeswoman for the Department of Consumer Affairs, which licenses about 10% of the cemeteries statewide.

If a mistake has been made and the body needs to be moved, the cemetery has to get approval from the person legally in charge of the remains, plus a court order for disinterment and a permit to rebury the body, said spokeswoman Tracey Weatherby.

Some experts in Jewish burial law said moving the body of Mazis’ father required permission from an Orthodox rabbi and consent of the family, who should sit in mourning for seven days after the reburial.

In general, Jewish law says bodies should only be moved if the ground is in danger of sinking, the state mandates other use of the land or the body is going to be reburied in Israel. “I cannot sufficiently overemphasize the delicacy with which the [Jewish] law treats the dead body,” said Rabbi Maurice Lamm, author of “The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning.”

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“The tradition never took this lightly,” Lamm said. “There is a demonstrable and deep respect for the dead. The children may feel this is a desecration of their father’s name, and they’re justified in feeling that way.”

Mazis said he is haunted by the feeling that his father isn’t resting in peace.

“He was very religious,” Mazis said. “He always told me, ‘Peter, you need to bury me as a Jewish person.’ He picked this plot, and I did everything right. I followed Jewish law. Why did this happen?”

When he died at age 84, Iosif Mazisyuk had lived in the United States for nearly 20 years, but he was still wedded to the traditions he grew up with in the Ukraine.

Mazisyuk was a manager at a factory in Kiev, the capital city, when his family decided to flee the region’s anti-Semitism. In 1977, they left for the United States.

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Once settled in a new land, Mazisyuk kept up the customs and rituals of Eastern European Jews. He regularly attended a West Hollywood synagogue with a predominantly Russian emigre congregation and selected a burial plot at Home of Peace, which he said reminded him of Eastern European cemeteries.

Mazisyuk died May 6 of complications following a heart attack and stroke. He was buried the next day at Home of Peace, and Mazis said he visited the grave regularly, in accordance with Orthodox custom.

During the first week after his father’s death, Mazis went to the synagogue to pray twice a day. The family sat shiva, or mourned, for the entire week. In the following month, Mazis did not shave and he covered all the mirrors in the house, as Jewish tradition dictates. At the end of the month, Mazis, a rabbi and a group of 25 friends and relatives held another service at his father’s grave.

But when he went to visit the cemetery July 14, Mazis said, his father’s body had been moved. Mazis said cemetery officials gave him conflicting stories about when the body had been moved.

The cemetery manager referred questions about the incident to temple officials, who said they did not have enough information yet to comment.

Mazis said he’s angry that he never received a letter of apology for the mistake, and is devastated that the error may have ruined the sanctity of the burial.

Even today, Mazis said, he can’t tell his elderly mother that his father’s body was moved, for fear the news would violently upset her. He stalls every time she asks to visit the grave, he said.

“What’s bothering me is how he was buried,” he said. “Was he just thrown in there? How do I know my father is lying in the new grave? There were no witnesses from my family. It’s still in my mind and it’s worrying me. When you put people there, you put them to rest forever.”