The Chevrah Kadisha, affectionately known as the ‘Chev’, is the largest Jewish welfare organisation on the African continent and the oldest in Johannesburg. What began as a burial society in 1888 has evolved into a comprehensive welfare organisation caring for the Jewish community’s needs from cradle to grave. Operating for 137 years, the Chev manages an annual budget of R380M (approximately $20M), of which 70% must be raised through the generous support of our donor partners.
The Chevrah Kadisha is the oldest Jewish organisation in Johannesburg and the largest Jewish welfare organisation on the African continent. Established in 1888, during Johannesburg’s pioneer gold rush years, it has been taking care of the welfare and burial needs of the community ever since. Through the vision of communal leadership, the Chevrah Kadisha has consolidated multiple welfare organisations under its umbrella. This has enabled economies of scale, a professional management infrastructure and an holistic approach to meeting the community’s needs. All support services are managed centrally including fundraising, finance, and operations.
We currently serve nearly 10,000 community members, representing approximately 25% of Johannesburg’s Jewish population, through our residential facilities and financial and social services. The Chev operates in compliance with the highest standards of corporate governance, where every cent is audited, accounted for and directed toward helping someone in need. Our Annual Financial Report is produced once a year. The Chev’s goal is to ensure that no Jew is ever left behind without help or hope.
From humble beginnings as a burial society, today 97% of their activities are focused on the living. In 1999, they were still a ‘small’ organisation with an annual budget of R24m.
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Chevra kadisha medal from 1876, on the occasion of the 200-year jubilee of the chevra kadisha of Gailingen.
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A Brief History of the Organisation
A brief history of the organisation:
- 1888 - Established to provide burial and emergency funding
- 1999 - Incorporation of Jewish Community Services
- 2000 - Incorporation of Sandringham Gardens home for the aged and infirm
- 2001 - Incorporation of Our Parents Home home for the aged
- 2002 - Incorporation of Arcadia Jewish Children’s Home
- 2003 - Establishment of Sandringham Lodge for those with mental health issues
- 2004 - Opening of Sandringham Square as part of the Berea relocation project
- 2005 - Incorporation of Selwyn Segal home for those with disabilities
- 2007 - Incorporation of Kadimah Occupational Centre which provides protected employment
Since 1888 the Chev has sustained itself through fundraising and some fee generation. Changing demographics and the rapid expansion of the organisation from 1999 to 2009 dramatically altered the landscape, adding significantly to their responsibilities and budget. They accepted requests to assume financial and managerial accountability for various independent Jewish entities. The Donald Gordon Foundation underwrote and enabled the aforementioned consolidation of Johannesburg’s numerous Jewish welfare service organisations into the Chevra Kadisha group. The intervening years have proven this move to have been both far-sighted and wise - the resultant increased efficiency and cost savings have been fundamental to their success.
Services Provided
Nowadays the Chevrah Kadisha is mandated by the community to care for almost 1,000 residents in its various facilities and several thousand community members through its financial and social services. They operate aged homes: Sandringham Gardens and Golden Acres; Arcadia Child and Youth Care Centre; Selwyn Segal for residents with intellectual and physical disabilities; and two mental health facilities, Sandringham Lodge and Sandringham Square which house people with mental illnesses. With the exception of the mental health facilities - which were Chevrah Kadisha initiatives created in response to community requests - all of the others were independent organisations that have been incorporated into the Chev Group since 1999.
According to Orthodox Judaism, burial should take place with minimal delay after someone dies-sometimes it is only hours after death before a body is buried and a funeral can take place. Between death and burial, a body is taken to a chevra kadisha, a Jewish burial society, where it is attended to by small groups of volunteers who complete tahara, the ancient Jewish practice of cleaning and purifying a body before burial.
The Ritual of Tahara
At the heart of the society's function is the ritual of tahara "purification". The body is first thoroughly cleansed of dirt, bodily fluids and solids, and anything else that may be on the skin, and then is ritually purified by immersion in, or a continuous flow of, water from the head over the entire body. Tahara may refer to the whole process or the ritual purification. Once the body is purified, the body is dressed in tachrichim, or shrouds, of white pure muslin or linen garments made up of ten pieces for a man and twelve for a woman, which are identical for each Jew and which symbolically recall the garments worn by the High Priest of Israel. Once the body is shrouded, the casket is closed.
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During tahara, volunteers work in silence as they clean the body, attend to any wounds or cuts, and immerse the body in a mikvah before wrapping it in white burial shrouds known as tachrichim. These shrouds have no buttons or knots, which according to Orthodox belief will make it easier for the body to travel to Jerusalem when the Messiah arrives.
“A body is dipped three times in the mikvah in order to bring it back to its original holiness and purity,” said Nicole Herzog, a volunteer with the chevra kadisha in Melbourne, Australia, for over a decade. “We comb the hair and dress the body in seven white linen dresses-just like the kohen gadol [the high priest] wore on Yom Kippur, when he used to enter the Temple in all white.”
The society may also provide shomrim to guard against body snatching, vermin, or desecration until burial. In some communities, this is done by people close to the departed or by paid shomrim hired by the funeral home. A specific task of the burial society is tending to the dead with no next of kin. Many burial societies hold one or two annual fast days and organise regular study sessions to remain up-to-date with the relevant articles of Jewish law.
While burial societies were, in Europe, generally a community function, in the United States, it has become far more common for societies to be organized by neighbourhood synagogues.
Chevra Kadisha During COVID-19 Pandemic
While tahara has been part of Jewish burial rituals for thousands of years, during the COVID-19 pandemic this ritual was upended as Jewish communities around the world struggled with the increased number of deceased-and the fear of infection and disease. There were two main areas of concern relating to tahara: the possible spread of COVID-19 from bodies during the cleansing process, with fear that the deceased could still be excreting infectious matter; and the possible spread among members of the chevra kadisha who work on cleansing the body in close quarters.
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Around the world, chevra kadishas have been forced to make difficult decisions as the death tolls in global Jewish communities mounted.
“In Melbourne, Australia, we anticipated the worst. We bought loads of PPE, extra gowns, masks, and gloves, and we asked that only younger women come in to do tahara, as opposed to older women who were more at risk,” said Ruth Meyerowitz, the office manager of the Melbourne chevra kadisha. “We were lucky. Australia had strict lockdowns and closed its borders, so we ended up being largely unscathed by the global pandemic. With only a handful of deceased bodies being suspected of having COVID-19, the decision was made to complete a full tahara on these small number of deceased.”
According to Meyerowitz, even though the number of bodies was small, the chevra kadisha made plans in case things got worse: “We prepared in other ways,” she said. “We didn’t want to alarm the community, but we were scared that there would be an increase in deaths, so we ordered extra morgue refrigeration, extra tachrichim, and we increased the number of built coffins we had on hand, just in case we needed them.”
She added: “Thank God we didn’t need any of these things.”
Unlike Australia, however, the United States was hit very hard, with some American chevra kadishas noting that at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic they were burying more than 10 times the usual number of bodies.
In response to mounting health concerns, both from transmission from deceased bodies and between volunteers of the chevra kadisha, revered poskim-rabbis who are experts in Jewish law-including Rabbi Hershel Schachter, the leading scholar of Jewish law at Yeshiva University, released Halachic guidance noting that due to the severe risk of disease and death, at the peak of the pandemic tahara could be suspended. Many chevra kadishas suspended tahara for all bodies, not just COVID-19 cases. This was possible due to the determination that tahara was not a prerequisite for Orthodox Jewish burial (newer guidance has since been released advising that tahara can resume, with full PPE).
While some Orthodox communities both in the United States and around the world suspended tahara during 2020 and for some of 2021, many other Orthodox communities, especially Haredi communities, chose to continue with the practice, albeit with some precautions.
Rabbi Elchonon Zohn, who is the founder and president of the National Association of Chevra Kadisha, released guidelines on tahara that met minimum Halachic requirements for a COVID-19-compliant burial. These guidelines offered important information for volunteers at chevra kadishas around the world, many of whom worked day and night to prepare bodies that were infected with COVID-19. Zohn’s guidelines included information advising that if tahara was undertaken, then the chevra kadisha must “strictly follow the general list of universal precautions recommended by the CDC” and “discard all unused supplies that were present at the tahara.”
The chevra kadisha in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was particularly hard hit, with the peak of the pandemic bringing a tenfold increase in bodies that needed to be prepared for burial.
“During COVID, if someone got sick, they went to the hospital, their families were unable to visit them, they died alone and then they couldn’t have proper funerals, minyanim, or shiva due to the pandemic,” said Rabbi Moishe Schmukler, a volunteer at the chevra kadisha in Crown Heights. “The deceased and families got nothing at all.”
The Crown Heights chevra kadisha continued to perform the full tahara burial rites on any deceased body that came through its doors, even at the height of the pandemic.
“We made sure all levayas [funerals] for people who died of COVID had at least a minyan. Some, their children were unable to travel to their funerals and the families endured very difficult circumstances,” said Schmukler. “The fact we were able to tell families: ‘Your loved one had a proper tahara before they were buried,’ provided many of them with some comfort. For most, the kaddish at the funeral was the only kaddish they said throughout the shiva and shloshim.”
According to Schmukler, “between kvuras [burials] and taharas we worked around the clock: Some chevra kadishas were working in three-hour shifts, a group of 10 volunteers in full PPE in order to complete the purification processes on bodies.” While the Crown Heights chevra kadisha did regular tahara with some extra precautions, he is aware of some chevra kadishas that followed the guidelines released by Zohn, which allowed them to perform a truncated version of the tahara, in what were still very difficult conditions. “In full PPE, you are schvitzing like crazy, in PPE your job becomes so much harder and exhausting, but there were so many bodies to prepare, we had no choice but to get through it,” Schmukler said.
As the pandemic moved from New York and hit other global Jewish communities, they, too, faced difficult decisions relating to performing the tahara rites on those who died of COVID-19.
Shirley Resnick has been a volunteer with the South African chevra kadisha for many years. “In Johannesburg, we try to bury people on the same day they pass away,” she said. “During COVID it was very scary, before the vaccine came out, we stopped all older persons from doing tahara and consulted widely with leading rabbis from all around the world regarding what we should do about tahara so we could make a decision. At the peak of the pandemic in South Africa, up to four times as many bodies were being buried per month due to the pandemic in Johannesburg alone.”
The South African Beth Din consulted with rabbis and poskim across the world and decided to suspend tahara on the grounds of safety.
With tahara now resuming in South Africa, new precautions have been enacted. “We work slower, everyone who does tahara must be vaccinated, and we take more time on the bodies, up to an hour to prepare them and we really try to avoid the splashing of mikvah water, even though we are all in full PPE,” Resnick said. “We don’t want COVID to be a reason to delay a levaya.”
Despite the hardship he went through during the peak of the pandemic, what sticks with Schmukler is the kindness of others who knew the toll the increased burials were having on the chevra kadisha in Crown Heights during those terrible days.
“One Sunday morning during the peak of the pandemic we had a funeral, and it was really bad,” he recalled. “All the shops were closed, and the gravediggers didn’t want to give us shovels to cover the graves because everyone was scared of COVID. In New York, the city was burying people who were not claimed and who had died of COVID in a mass grave on Hart Island. At the Crown Heights chevra kadisha, we had many bodies to bury, and we made a decision that we still wanted to bury them properly, with tahara, but we needed to find shovels to cover the grave ourselves. One man with a hardware store heard we needed supplies, so during those really scary days, when everyone was terrified and staying home and absolutely everything was shut, he opened his store.
Resurgence of Interest
Over the past century, North American Jewish communities and many Chevra Kadisha moved from participating in the full range of traditional Jewish practices and limited the role of the Chevra Kadisha to preparing bodies for burial. This change may have stemmed from Western culture’s avoidance of death and preference for relying on specialists. Since the 1960s, there has been a resurgence of interest in North American Jewish communities the beautiful and profound Jewish rituals around death. Chevra Kadisha members often work in teams for the ritual of taharah. In many communities, Chevra Kadisha members are volunteers, offering their time and care for these rituals as a holy gift and service to their communities.
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