Death, Burial, and Bereavement
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Sending a Sympathy Card With Flowers
Is it proper to send a bereaved person a sympathy card that has pictures of flowers on it? It isn’t customary to send flowers to Jewish bereaved persons, but there’s nothing objectionable about pictures of flowers on a sympathy card.
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Mourning for Grandparents
Are we forbidden to mourn for our grandparents? We are not supposed to mourn excessively, but this doesn’t mean not being sad; it means that the specific laws of mourning, which forbid certain things for 7 or 30 days (or…
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Organ Donation
Why is it permissible to receive an organ donation, but not for a Jew to donate an organ? Removing a vital organ from a person who is not yet legally dead (by halachic standards) is regarded as murder; but if…
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The Soul After Death
According to Jewish tradition, does the soul goto heaven immediately when someone dies? The idea that the soul remains near the body for three days after a person dies is mentioned in the Talmud Yerushalmi (Moed Katan 3:5): "For three…
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An Organ Donator Being Buried in a Jewish Cemetery
Can I be an organ donor and still be buried in an Orthodox cemetery? A person who saves someone’s life by donating an organ hes done a great Mitzvah. The Halachic problem that arises is that if the organ is…
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Donating Bone Marrow
Can a Jew give bone marrow to someone with whom a match has been found through a bone marrow registry, even if that person is a non-Jew? Absolutely. Someone who refrains from doing so because the recipient is a non-Jew…
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The Prohibition of Cremation
Is cremation prohibited, or is this just a custom that arose after the Holocaust? Cremation is prohibited by the Torah. The atrocities of the Holocaust have no bearing at all on this prohibition. Our Rabbis tell us [Reference?] that someone…
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Yahrzeit Commemoration
My father passed away recently. Although my father and I rarely saw eye to eye on anything, we loved each other dearly and were very close. This is a difficult time for me. I remember something referred to as a…