Finding Spiritual Uplift in Building a Caring Community: Scholar-in-Residence David Zinner

7:30-8:30pm Kabbalat Shabbat Service

8:30pm An introductory overview of the modern Chevra Kadisha movement and how to build and sustain continuum-of-life resources within an active, vibrant and caring community.

SATURDAY, December 7

9-10 am Chanting with Beth Sandweiss and Melissa Shaffer

SUNDAY, December 8

12:00-1:00pm Lunch

Bnai Keshet 2013 scholar-in-residence David Zinner, founder, president and executive director of Kavod v’Nichum, (honor and comfort), a 13-year-old nonprofit center for Chevra Kadisha organizing, educating and training, leads community chevra training sessions, December 6-8. Congregants from Montclair-area synagogues and the unaffiliated are invited to attend.
 

Zinner plans to present a mix of sessions, starting Friday night with a history of the modern Chevra Kadisha movement among Jewish communities seeking to reclaim centuries-old traditions that once were central to Jewish communal life. Saturday he examines the textual basis for Jewish death and burial practices in Torah and Talmud; and Sunday he conducts training sessions that include a live demonstration of tahara, the ritual washing, cleaning and dressing of the deceased for burial. Zinner's assistant both days will be Eva Sax-Bolder, a rabbinic student and Chevra Kadisha member in New York.

In his role as executive director of Kavod v'Nichum's non-denominational Gamliel Institute, Zinner co-teaches courses on Chevra Kadisha history and organizing, tahara and shmira – round-the-clock sitting with the deceased from death until burial –  and building capacities in Jewish communities that enable all participants to meaningfully navigate these final life cycle events. Kavod v’Nichum is the only non-Orthodox organization of its kind for Chevra Kadisha groups in North America. 

The group sponsors annual conferences aimed at overcoming hurdles to reclaiming Jewish death and burial traditions, such as recognizing the reality of death, teaching traditional practices at the end of life continuum that are directed toward “kavod ha met” – respecting and honoring the deceased and “nichum aveilim” – comforting the mourners.  The group recently was cited by the Slingshot Guide as one of the top 50 innovative Jewish organizations in America. 

Says Zinner: "It's important to work at changing the culture in synagogues and communities so that people are reliant on each other, not on outside folks, to help with end-of-life issues. So when someone dies, we don't call the funeral home first, we call the chevarim first. They step forward, call the family and do the arrangements. The family doesn't have to go to the funeral home.  The family's taken care of from that moment on through the whole process." 

Long active in the Reconstructionist movement, Zinner honed community-organizing skills after college as a VISTA volunteer in the mid-1970s organizing food co-operatives.  He got into Jewish death and burial issues in the mid-1990s, researching whether his Reconstructionist synagogue should buy a section at a Maryland cemetery. He found the volunteer-run Jewish Funeral Practices Committee of Greater Washington, and began doing taharot. 

Zinner’s grandparents, immigrant Jews from Germany, were paid to perform taharot for Jewish funeral homes in St. Louis. What Zinner sees now is a re-awakening of interest in traditional practices with cadres of volunteers being trained to step up and perform the mitzvot. To that end, he has trained new community chevrot kadisha in more than 100 different locations over the last decade, including Boston in October, Cleveland last month and Montclair, NJ, when he visits Bnai Keshet.

At Kavod v’Nichum’s 2013 conference in Philadelphia early last June, Zinner called on chevrot at area synagogues to organize and negotiate better rates with funeral homes. He will discuss such strategies during his December 6-8 weekend at Bnai Keshet.

Sax-Bolder is a student in the ALEPH Alliance for Jewish Renewal Rabbinic Program and resides in Westchester County, NY with her husband and two daughters; she works as a speech and language pathologist and a Jewish spiritual director, and integrates her background in Jewish chanting, art, meditation, yoga and movement into praying, teaching and performing rituals.