New London, CT – A Connecticut woman has agreed to settle her lawsuit against her Jewish congregation over the burial of a black woman in the synagogue’s cemetery.
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Maria Balaban’s lawyer says he and an attorney for the Congregation Ahavath Achim in Colchester reached a tentative deal Wednesday, in the middle of the trial. Terms aren’t being disclosed. The congregation’s board and members must approve the agreement.
The 73-year-old Balaban sued the congregation last year over the burial of Juliet Steer in 2010, saying the synagogue broke its own rules against burial of non-Jews at the cemetery. Balaban initially wanted Steer’s body exhumed and relocated, but later dropped that request.
The congregation’s lawyer didn’t immediately return a message Wednesday. He had said that Balaban was suing only because Steer was black, which Balaban denied.
In the grave the skin is the first thing to disappear.
I found myself stranded for a few days in a small town in MA. There seems to be no signs of frum life left there today but I did notice a Jewish Cemetary that had signs stressing only Shomrei Shaboss.
Thank goodness it’s finally settled. The demand to exhume the woman was a disgrace.
So little u know…. Its not about color! Its about religion!! Religion doesn’t change down there!
Who cares if the woman was black, the only issue should be was she Jewish, and that’s what the article should have emphasized with its heading.
We have to believe that all is min Hashomaiyim and this non jewish woman was zoche to be buried in jewish plot she either is Jewish just didn’t know it or did something really good to Jews…there’s no coincidence my dear friends…
The obvious question is whether there were other non-Jews buried in this cemetery. If they have an “interfaith section,” it seems likely.
On Sunday I went to the burial of a good friend, a ger tzedek, a big baal chesed, who grew up as the son of a black bricklayer. He now has a son who is a rav in a NJ day school, a daughter who is a rebbetzin in a frum shul in NJ. The deceased, Akiva ben Avraham, was a brave man who converted in the heated 1960s and married a white Jewish woman in Maryland only two years after inter-racial marriage became legal there. Skin color is irrelevant when the neshama is a Jew who lived a Torah life in this world.