Tziduk Ha’Din / Ordnung der Gebete bei Beerdigungen [Burial Service].

(HOLOCAUST.

Nova-Druckerei

Berlin

1940

Hebrew with vowel points (nikud) and German. Marginalia in blue pen

A remarkable and tragic publication. A small pamphlet containing the Jewish Burial Service - poignantantly, and without doubt, the very last religious Hebrew text published in Berlin upon the onset of the Nazi Holocaust. The tragic fate of German Jewry is particularly reflected on page 9: “Gebet bei Beisetzung von Asche” (Funeral Service for Ashes). The Gestapo would choose on occasion to return to loved ones the cremated remains of family members who had been interned and subsequently murdered in concentration camps. The Gestapo sadistically forced these bereaved families to pay the financial costs for the duration the murdered individual was "housed and fed" before his murder and only then would they return the body. Contemporary German rabbis were thus forced to determine a view as to how these cremated remains might be laid to rest, given that Jewish law categorically forbids the practice of cremation Rabbi Menachem Mendel Kirschbaum, the Chief Justice of the Bet Din of Frankfurt-am-Main published a halachic text: Takanoth eich le-hithnaheg be-epher ha-nisraphim, (Cracow, 1939), according to whose guidelines, the Burial Society are to place the remains into a coffin together with a Talith and Tachrichin (shrouds), as if the remains were fully intact, in order to affirm the traditional Jewish belief in the Resurrection of the Dead. An exceptionally rare publication