From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Lawmakers call for better, clearer rules for burying stillborns
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Speaking at a meeting of the Knesset Health Committee on the topic of the urgent need to update the protocols for the burial of fetuses and stillborns, MK Yonatan Mashriki (Shas) calls on the Health Ministry to quickly formulate a uniform, national protocol for handling the burial of fetuses, and to publish an information booklet for parents about their rights.
Critics say that parents of stillborns, who are already in the throes of mental anguish, often encounter confusing procedures, a lack of organized information, and an inadequate response from medical and government agencies when dealing with how to bury the fetus.
Mashriki calls on the Health Ministry to convene a roundtable with the Religious Affairs Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the National Insurance Institute, and burial companies to act promptly to update the procedure, which was last revised in 2014.
According to the initiator of the discussion, MK Michal Waldiger (Religious Zionism party), stillbirths are a “human tragedy that strikes approximately 1,500 families every year.”
Ohad Weigler, a representative of the nonprofit Itim, says the ministry has been working on the issue “for over three years, and with each passing day, additional families join the circle of pain.”
He says that the existing protocol gives parents the right to attend the funeral organized by the hospital, but this right is not included in the forms submitted for their signature.
Hila Cohen-Eiss, who had a stillbirth 13 years ago, says that she only found out after signing the forms presented to her in the delivery room that she had effectively given up “all information regarding my son and his burial place.”
She stresses the need for parents to wait to sign the forms in another hospital ward or at home, to allow them to cope with the loss.
She says the hospital rabbi told her she lost her rights to know the burial place of her son, whom she named Yonatan.
“I still don’t know where he is buried,” Cohen-Eiss says.
The Times of Israel Community.