As Pullout Nears, Gaza’s Graves a Stumbling Block

Shlomo Yulis thought the sand-strewn hilltop cemetery that holds the dead of the Jewish settlements of the Gaza Strip would be his final resting place. Especially after he buried his young son here.

Now, less than a week before the Gaza settlements are to be evacuated, Yulis does not know when or how the body of 14-year-old Itai, who died in 1993 of leukemia, will be exhumed and reburied after the settlers depart.

“How can I leave without him?” said Yulis, who moved to Gaza 23 years ago. “He wanted to be buried here, and I told him I would stay with him always.”

The disposition of the graves of Gush Katif, Gaza’s main settlement block, has become one of the most wrenching questions surrounding the evacuation of nearly 9,000 Jewish settlers, which is set to begin Wednesday. The bodies of 48 people are buried in the cemetery, where blue-and-white Israeli flags flap in the searing summer wind and an electrified fence carries a warning sign to keep away.

Funeral and mourning rituals, governed by strict rules pertaining to the handling of bodies, occupy a hallowed place in Jewish tradition. And thus the planned removal of the cemetery, this most literal leaving of the land, has become painfully entwined with the larger battle over whether Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is right to relinquish Gaza, which was seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War.

A majority of Israelis support the decision made by Sharon to end Israel’s occupation of a teeming, poverty-stricken strip of territory that is home to more than 1.3 million Palestinians. But settlers and their supporters have struggled determinedly to thwart the uprooting of settlements and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

The Israeli government says it is doing all it can to handle the planned exhumations with sensitivity and understanding. But officials quietly complain that the settlers, many of whom still believe that the Gaza withdrawal won’t take place, have resisted all efforts to reach an agreement on details of the bodies’ removal and reburial.

Emotions on both sides boiled over last month when Brig. Gen. Yisrael Weiss, the chief chaplain of the Israeli military, visited the largest Gaza settlement to try to discuss the exhumations. Demonstrators mobbed him, throwing crumpled-up black garbage bags in his face and telling him to use them to gather up bones.

One protester even shouted at Weiss, whose adult daughter was killed several years ago in a traffic accident: “Should someone come and dig up your daughter’s grave?” The rabbi visibly paled.

“Such an attack is not worthy of my anger,” he told Israel Radio later. “These people lashed out in rage, with burning hatred, crossing all red lines and losing their own humanity.”

Jewish religious law, or halacha, does make some provisions for the exhumation and reburial of bodies. Among the permissible reasons for moving graves is knowledge that they would probably be damaged, for example by flood.

“Honor of the dead is a very basic tenet in Judaism, and normally every effort is made not to disturb the dead,” said Rabbi David Golinkin, a professor of Jewish law at Jerusalem’s Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies. “But there are exceptions, and it seems this is one of them.”

Israel’s two chief rabbis -- Sephardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar and Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger -- agreed that the risk of graves being desecrated by Palestinian extremists once Israel left Gaza was enough to justify uprooting the cemetery.

“The graves must be moved if Jews will no longer be there,” Amar told Israel Radio.

But the rabbis insisted that a detailed agreement must first be reached with the families. Many families, however, refused to talk about the matter with government representatives, saying they could not make decisions about reburial without knowing where they themselves would ultimately resettle.

The battle went all the way to Israel’s Supreme Court, which ordered the government to reach some accord with the relatives before acting to move the bodies.

“The families are very vulnerable,” said attorney Motti Mintzer, who represented 17 sets of relatives in their Supreme Court case. “And time is ticking away.”

In the withdrawal’s wake, the bodies would probably be removed by the rabbinate of the Israeli military or of the Defense Ministry, which have specially trained units made up of observant Jews.

But many people who are religiously observant balk at the idea of cooperating in any way with the pullout. The Zaka burial society, an Orthodox Jewish organization whose volunteers are a fixture at the scenes of suicide bombings searching for the tiniest scraps of flesh, was approached by the security establishment about helping with the exhumation of the settler graveyard, according to Israeli news reports. But its leaders refused.

The exhumation, when it occurs, will not only be harrowing, but technically demanding. Because the bodies of civilians are buried only in shrouds -- unlike Israeli soldiers, who are interred in caskets -- the surrounding ground must be carefully sifted in search of any remains.

Complicating matters, differing streams of Judaism have different interpretations of precisely what exhumation procedures are permissible under halacha.

The heartbreak is intensified for families who will probably be unable to make the traditional commemorations of the yahrzeit, or mourning anniversary.

The death anniversary of Bryna and Samuel Hilberg’s son Yochanan, an Israeli naval commando killed in Lebanon, falls in early September, when they will already have been ordered out of their Gush Katif home.

But exhumation and reburial of the body is unlikely by then, so they will have no grave to visit.

Paul Birnbaum, whose rabbi son Shimon was stabbed to death by a Palestinian in 1992, said he thought all the Gush Katif graves should be moved together and made into a national memorial.

“If you scatter the graves, whatever was learned there will be lost,” he said.

Other families say they want the graves close to their new homes. But under terms of the government’s relocation plan, they can take up to two years to decide where they want to resettle permanently, which could leave the remains in limbo.

The exhumations and reburials will reopen old wounds, the families say -- not least because tradition calls on them to reenact an abbreviated version of the ritual of sitting shiva and tearing their clothing in mourning.

The psychological strain is difficult for some to bear.

“I dream of her body being stolen in the night, of chasing someone through the graveyard,” said Dan Davidovich, whose 30-year-old daughter, Ahuva, was killed in a shooting attack by Palestinians in Gaza three years ago. “I keep wondering when her second funeral will be -- imagine planning this in advance.”

Some family members have threatened to hole up in the graveyard when the evacuation order comes, flinging themselves across the graves of their loved ones.

“I would kill myself on his grave rather than let anyone touch it,” said settler Miri Gobi, whose 23-year-old son, Elkana, was accidentally killed by Israeli troops during a confrontation with Palestinian attackers in 2002.

Others have retreated into a quieter sorrow.

“I only hope God will guide me and tell me what to do,” said Yulis, the father of Itai, the young leukemia victim. “Because I don’t know what to do. Really, I can’t imagine what will feel like the right thing.”