In Jerusalem, the tradition is to bury the person before sundown and with a flat, more plaque-like marker than any upright headstone or other statue-ish thing. In other places, it is done as soon as possible (I believe it must be before the Sabbath) and usually takes about a day. Frozen ground means more work, although it should be able to be dealt with without such measures as jackhammers and dynamite: building a fire, boiling water, some other application of heat to make it softer, big strong men with determined faces and good tools.
And mausolea are right out. You come from the earth, and you return to the earth. That’s that.
If you care to strictly adhere to the law, that is.
]]>But, the law says before the next sabbath. Without embalming, sure, things will begin to stink. In some areas religious officials allow burial exceptions. For example, in southern California, the requisite plain woodening casket is buried inside a cement container for earthquake reasons. The cement container is technically a boundary between two sections of earth, but it’s allowed because the religious officials okay’d it.
I asked my elderly relatives who did this in a frozen tundra in the beginning of last century. One said she remembered as a child, men working in shifts and using small, sharp shovels. One said he boiled water and poured it on the ground when the shovels didn’t work.
]]>In Groton, he uses a propane heater shaped like a casket which and thaws a rectangle of ground “just the spot I’m going to dig.”
Overnight, it glows red in ghostly fashion.
— The Plots Thicken, Lowell Sun, 24 Jan 2003
The story seems to say that in pre-propane-heater times people either broke the ground with incredible efforts or just waited till spring. The Jewish tradition was stretched to mean “as soon as possible” rather than “within 24 hours”.
]]>I wonder how, too. Maybe they have some sort of funky ground-heater? Or maybe there’s some sort of foul-weather exception to the rules that I’m not aware of.
You should write to The Straight Dope and ask!
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