Controversy over Jewishness of Dead Soldier Prompts Bill

A Knesset member has introduced legislation that would require the Israel Defense Force to bury all soldiers who die in the line of duty in military cemeteries as long as they enlisted as Jews.

The issue, a source of tension between secular and religious parties in Israel’s coalition government, heated up after the interment of a soldier who was not Jewish according to traditional religious law.

The move was made Sunday by Knesset member Naomi Chazan of the secularist Meretz bloc. It followed the burial the same day of Sgt. Lev Pesahov, a recent immigrant from Russia who was shot to death in a terrorist attack on an army checkpoint last week.

Because his mother is not Jewish, Pesahov was buried at the fringe of the military cemetery in Beit She’an.

The military rabbinate first refused to bury Pesahov at all in the military cemetery. But it later agreed to inter him at the edge of the cemetery, far away from the other graves.

Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein, also of Meretz, termed the burial a “disgrace.” He said he would demand that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin issue the necessary instructions so that such an incident is not repeated.

Knesset member Avraham Ravitz of the fervently Orthodox Degel HaTorah faction said he saw nothing wrong with the way the soldier was buried as he was not, he said, technically Jewish.

Rabbi Menachem Porush, also of Degel HaTorah, contended that although Pesahov should be appreciated for having fallen for the country, “people who are Jewish would not want a non-Jew to be buried next to them.”

A similar debate erupted in early July, when Olga Chaikov, a Soviet immigrant, was killed when terrorists attacked a bus in Jerusalem.

She was ordered buried in a special cemetery section reserved for “questionable Jews” after officials of the chevra kadisha, or burial society, consulted Jerusalem Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Kolitz.