L. J. Greenberg - Delayed Burial

Delayed Burial

Greenberg had expressed the wish that he should be cremated and his remains buried, without any religious ceremony, near Mount Scopus in Palestine. The casket containing his ashes arrived in Haifa in November 1931, but the Orthodox rabbinate in Jerusalem insisted that since Jewish law prohibits cremation, it could not be buried in consecrated ground. Letters flew back and forth between London and Palestine as his son Ivan tried to resolve the impasse. In January 1932, Joe Linton, one of Weizmann's aides, suggested burying the casket in Herbert Bentwich's private garden near Mount Scopus. This would have been a nice irony since the two men had loathed one another. In any event, this solution was overruled by the rabbinate. By May 1932, the casket was still in the customs office in Haifa, and officials threatened to throw it out if something was not done about it. Eventually, through the combined efforts of Moshe Sharett (later Foreign Minister and Prime Minister of Israel) and Chaim Arlosoroff, both high-ranking officials in the Jewish Agency, a resting place for Greenberg's remains was found at Kibbutz Degania by the shore of the Sea of Galilee.