Look, I replied to @alessan before I’d read the rest of the thread. My mistake. I apologize.
I wasn’t trying to goysplain or whatever, just offering an alternate explanation based on what I know from what the Jews I’ve known have told me.
I was actually a little bit confused- I knew @Alessan was an Israeli Jew, but I didn’t realize you were an American Jew, or that there were small differences in ceremonies between the two communities. I thought maybe you (not realizing you were Jewish) had confused something.
I was confused by Alessan’s post, too, but figured it was a different custom in Israel. All the dead Jews i know who’ve had Jewish burials had a gravestone put up a year later, too.
(I’m Jewish, but a lot of my family opted for something other than a Jewish burial, as well. My parents and MIL were cremated. My husband’s uncle was buried by the US military in a generally Jewish service, but i have no clue when they put up the headstone. No family attended that.)
I haven’t generally seen stone slabs in the Jewish cemeteries, either. Lots of pebbles on the gravestones, though. And my cousin says she sometimes leaves a roll on our grandmother’s grave, for reasons that make sense to my family.
So here’s a question that’s been bugging me since the Jewish funeral of the mother of a childhood friend. My father and a lot of the parents of my childhood friends are buried at a Jewish cemetery called Hillside in West Los Angeles. (Al Jolson’s famous grave is there).
Most of them are in the ground except for one friend’s set of parents. I missed his father’s funeral because I had Covid but I attended his mother’s a couple months ago. Besides the regular graves, they have these wall crypts that can apparently hold up to four people (based on the plaques on some of them). Dad was already in there and they pushed him back and slid Mom in. So there are these walls of lots of corpses.
When we were walking from the service to the crypt I was literally morbidly curious how it worked. I asked the rabbi about it and said that I thought that tradition was to be in the ground. She said that we’d put dirt on top of the coffin and that satisfied the tradition. The question seemed to annoy her so I left it alone at that.
My understanding is that embalming is forbidden. Given that, why don’t those walls smell from all of the decaying corpses? Answers from anyone are welcome.
Shock rocker GG Allin’s gravestone was also removed, for the same reasons. That hasn’t stopped his fans from visiting his unmarked grave. Here’s a satirical look at this postmortem phenomenon.
From what I’ve read, mausoleums are more or less designed to be ventilated in such a way that they don’t smell where the visitors are.
Beyond that, I wonder if an un-embalmed body would smell for an extended period, or if it would be really intense for a short period, and then calm down?
Yes. Fuller and her partner’s (it’s unclear if they were married) bodies were not found after the shipwreck, but their infant son’s was. He is buried there, and the marker mentions all three.
I found that marker after seeking out the grave of R. Buckminster Fuller. Turns out he was Margaret’s grand nephew.
When I was in college, they set out mouse poison. A mouse died in one of the 5th floor heating units, where we couldn’t get at it. We learned this when we noticed the smell. Then it dropped to the 4th floor and the smell became more intense. Then it dropped to the 3rd floor, and the smell was still pretty bad. Then it dropped to the 2nd floor and smelled musty. And then the smell went away. All of this happened in a couple of weeks.
Maybe it takes longer for a human body, which is so much larger. But it won’t stink forever.
