Final Chapter

Though unable to resist a pinch here, a poke there, and even a few mock punches and explosive giggles, the 370 students seated at the edge of the tombstones in Mount Sinai cemetery Thursday said they took their mission very seriously.

“You have to keep the Jewish tradition alive,” said 10-year-old Matan Cafri, a fifth-grader at Kadima Hebrew School in Woodland Hills.

Clad in yarmulkes and T-shirts, Matan and hundreds of other fifth- and sixth-graders came from Jewish schools all over Los Angeles County to participate in the ritual burial of religious books.

For thousands of years, Jews have buried religious books that can no longer be used because they’re in bad condition--adhering to their faith’s injunction against simply discarding writings that include God’s name. Tens of thousands of books already are interred in special sections of Mount Sinai.

But four years ago, the cemetery decided to turn the practice into a ceremony for children as a way of teaching them about Jewish culture and to show them a Jewish cemetery.

As the sun glinted off cars whizzing by on the freeway below, Rabbi Ben Zion Bergman told students that as Jews they are “the people of the book, ruled by laws and not by men.”

Then, students filed up and buried books, including some that had been in their families for decades.

“You don’t bury ‘Harry Potter’ when you’re done with it,” said Sarina Rubin from Sinai Akiba Academy in West Los Angeles. “But these books are holy.”