Judaism believes that death is the separation of the souls from mortal flesh. The soul moves on and exists in eternity, whereas the body does not. In death, the body must be treated with respect, so that with the coming of the messiah, the soul and the body can be reunited in the world to come. The natural decay of the body is imperative, easing the soul away from the body. The vessel is sacred, and Jewish law and ritual dictate that it be treated with total respect.
What does this mean for those who perished at the hands of the Third Reich? During Operation 1005 the nazis wanted to eliminate all evidence of their crimes and all traces of Jews. They opened up mass graves just to burn more bodies, additionally disturbing bodies that had begun to settle. Because of the beliefs that souls will be reunited with their body when the Messiah comes, to cremate the body is to defile the body. This is problematic upon the realization that burning bodies and cremation was the nazis preferred method of getting rid of the masses of Jewish bodies they murdered. So I’m not sure what that means for those bodies and those souls. I think that God does understand when circumstances are out of our control and would not cause any continued suffering.
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Burning Jewish bodies was not just a Nazi attempt to cover the crime but also another way that the perpetrators harmed and humiliated the victims. My father was a Protestant minister. Once he died in surgery and was revived. I figured that someone like him would have an interesting perspective on what happens after death. Once, he was better, I asked him about his experience. He replied that his sense of having died briefly was that humans had anthropomorphized G-d too much and what he experienced was a glimpse of something so vast and encompassing that it defied human understanding. People come from a diversity of belief structures, and I honor all of them, but I greatly appreciated my father’s reflection in this context. I believe said something to the effect that “in terms of troubling questions, men and women need to leave G-d to G-d.”
Desecration, immortality and the immortal soul: The anatomy of nationalist “hatred” and desecration of the national “soul”