Seattle funeral director learns Jewish burial procedures via FaceTime
According to CNN, the funeral director never performed the bathing ritual before, therefore he decided to use FaceTime to connect with those more informed.
By ZACHARY KEYSERChevra Kadisha workers wearing protective clothes, carry the body of a patient died from complications of Coronavirus (COVID-19) infection, at the Shamgar Funeral Home in Jerusalem on April 1, 2020(photo credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH90)
Shoshana Ungerleider, a San Francisco-based doctor and founder of End Well, spoke with CNN about a funeral director in Seattle who used FaceTime to connect with members of the local Jewish community in order to decipher how to perform a proper Jewish burial.According to CNN, the funeral director never performed the ritual of washing the body before burial before, therefore he decided to use FaceTime to connect with those more informed.Considering there are shelter-in-place orders for the Seattle area due to the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, the funeral director had to get creative, and did everything in his power to give the deceased a proper send-off without having the option to speak with the family in person due to fears and instructions surrounding the viral spread.The only way for the funeral director to safely do this was to revert to using technology to connect with these families from a distance - eventually learning the proper procedures through a remote lesson from the Seattle Jewish community."Because of social distancing, [the funeral director] was the only one allowed in with the body, and he was determined to go through the ritual because the other congregants could not," Ungerleider said to CNN. "He didn't have to do it. He wanted to do it. He wanted to let the man's family and the committee of volunteers from the temple bury him in peace."
