Virtually everyone buried in France is threatened with eventual cremation.
French law that is aggressively secular prohibits establishing cemeteries exclusive to a particular religion. As a result, all burials that take place in France are held within the same larger cemeteries used by the non-Jewish populace. Nonetheless, the Jews manage their burials mostly within sections that are generally Jewish.
However, after 50 or 100 years, the government is legally entitled to exhume all the remains of those buried there, and the remains become the full property of municipal authorities.
What happens to these Jewish remains?
HaRav Nosson Kahn, editor of the French publication Kountras who first revealed many of the details, says that the usual practice up until recently was for the remains to be held in wooden boxes in municipal warehouses. According to best available estimates, the city of Paris has exhumed the remains of about 10,000 Jews over the last sixty years by municipal workers, without any consideration for the extensive Jewish laws relating to the dignity of the departed.
Among many others, the remains of HaRav Yehoshua Heschel Levine, zt"l, a descendant of HaRav Chaim of Volozhin, were found and after considerable effort were reburied on Har Zeisim.
HaRav Yaakov Tadesco zt"l was a great baal-chesed who insisted that all his daughters marry sons of rabbinical figures from Germany. The families of his sons all assimilated, but the families of his daughters now include some 3,000 families living in Eretz Yisroel, including families named Bamberger, Wechsler, Neuwirth, Sanger Bitztrisky and others. Mrs. Lifschitz, a descendant, sought to find HaRav Tadesco's remains. She eventually traced them to a municipal warehouse, but since the box with HaRav Tadesco's remains also holds the remains of another person, the authorities refuse to release them to her.
The family believes that one of the sons of the family, Yisrael Sanger, when to visit his relatives in Paris during a cholera epidemic. Unfortunately he caught the disease and died on a Shabbos in the 1880's, and was buried for some reason in the grave of his grandfather, and his are the other remains in the box.
French officials said that anyone who is against cremation would not be cremated, however a new law insists that there must be explicit testimony that the person expressed opposition to cremation during his lifetime.
MK Rabbi Uri Maklev has been active in trying to help the situation. He has asked the Israeli Foreign Ministry to use diplomatic channels, and has also asked the Speaker of the Knesset to use legislative channels via the French legislature. Rabbi Maklev said, "World Jewry and also non-Jewish authorities throughout the world are aware of the issues of shechita, but there is not sufficient awareness of other difficult problems, like burial in France. It is our job to raise the public awareness of these issues."
HaRav Pinchas Goldschmidt, head of the Conference of European Rabbis, will meet with the Interior Minister of France, Manual Wallace, to ask him to find a comprehensive solution to Jewish burial in France. He will also ask that more effort be invested in attempting to locate relatives of those exhumed to help in taking care of the remains.
