Rabbi Yaakov Ruzah’s eyes are privy to unspeakable horrors. Horrors that can shake even a man like Ruzah, the world’s foremost rabbinic authority on the laws of death and mourning.
“What I saw after October 7, I haven’t seen in my entire career,” says Ruzah as he sits at his living room table in Bat Yam, a city just south of Tel Aviv, where he serves pro bono as chief rabbi.
“You saw how they purposely desecrated bodies, you saw bodies of babies… you never see babies like this… It is very difficult. I am managing to hold on, but there are people around me who are not able to deal with it,” he says.
As the supreme halachic authority on death, Ruzah wears two hats, one civilian and one military. During his five-decade military career, he has risen to the rank of colonel and serves as the IDF chief rabbi’s adviser on matters related to death and body identification.
As chairman of the Chief Rabbinate’s Dignity of the Deceased Council and as former rabbi of Abu Kabir’s National Center for Forensic Medicine, he is responsible for all non-military personnel murdered in the October 7 massacre.
Judaism has developed a robust and intricate legal system for determining death, even when there is no corpse. A Jewish people that is no stranger to horror and the hostility of host nations — pagan, Christian or Muslim — has seen pogroms, blood libels, the Crusades, auto-da-fés, and the Holocaust. Throughout this bloody history, sages have generated hundreds of legal precedents codifying responses to nearly every imaginable atrocity.
Yet even this rich legal tradition, developed over the ages in exile under repressive and extreme conditions, has come up short, says Ruzah.
“The slaughter of October 7 revived halachic rulings dormant for centuries. And some of the cases that arose were totally unprecedented” in the corpus of Jewish law, he says.
What should be done, for instance, with the cars in which dozens of victims were shot to death? Judaism’s unique sensitivities surrounding the bodies of deceased people dictated that all remains should be removed from the cars.
But for Ruzah that was not enough.
“Even if we manage to remove all of the remains, there is something not right about selling cars in which Jews were massacred for scrap metal so that the insurance companies could get back some of their money.”
Ruzah’s halachic ruling, still pending Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi David Lau’s affirmation, is to bury the cars. The resulting mound would become a monument to the victims.
Uncharted territory
On October 7, about 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists rampaged through Gaza border communities, murdering civilians in their homes and on the streets and attacking military bases. They butchered some 360 participants of the Supernova rave music festival.
Some 1,200 Israelis, most of whom were civilians, were killed amid acts of great brutality. Approximately 240 were taken hostage to Gaza.
A day after Hamas’s attack, Ruzah was called up for IDF reserve duty. Since then, he has been part of one of three teams taking turns serving 12-hour shifts at the Shura army base on the outskirts of Ramle.
At the age of 79, he might be the oldest soldier serving in the IDF.
Shura, which served until October 7 as a logistics center and the home of the IDF’s rabbinate, has been transformed into a huge processing center for the deceased.
A “hell on earth” is the way Ruzah describes Shura, where hundreds of corpses, victims of the massacre, have been brought for identification. In the first weeks of his service, the smell of the dead was overwhelming.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War was Ruzah’s crash course in the intricacies of halacha surrounding death verification, corpse identification, the sanctity of the dead and sitting shiva, the seven-day mourning period following a funeral.
But nothing he experienced during that war and in the years since as rabbi of the Abu Kabir National Center for Forensic Medicine from 1994 until 2021 or in the IDF’s body identification unit fully prepared him for the atrocities perpetrated on this year’s Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah.
The extent of the slaughter and its viciousness were unprecedented not just historically, but also halachically. Bodies burnt beyond recognition so that even a DNA check is impossible; mayhem so extreme that it has taken months to sort out who is missing and who is dead; cemeteries located in a war zone, preventing the burial of the deceased; the remains and blood of the dead strewn far and wide, necessitating the burial of objects, including entire cars.
A relative has gone missing. Is he dead? Is she alive? Ruzah is the ultimate halachic authority to whom families turn to be freed from their limbo. The ability to sit shiva — or not — for a son, a daughter, a father, a mother, a wife or a husband depends on Ruzah’s ruling. A wife becomes a widow, a child becomes an orphan. Or, if the evidence is lacking, the uncertainty continues.
The majority of Israelis are not Orthodox in terms of daily observance, but most defer to Orthodox rabbis such as Ruzah in matters of mourning and marriage. Ruzah is a nationally recognized arbiter of Jews’ rites of passage from this world to the next. And the responsibility is great. He takes his job seriously.
Only once during this interview and the ensuing correspondence did Ruzah get angry. It was in response to a question that implied his rulings were based on “reasonable assumptions,” not absolute truth.
“No one sits shiva based on a reasonable assumption,” the rabbi fumed. “A person sits shiva only after there is utter certainty that the relative is dead. A woman remarries only after it has been determined without a doubt that her husband is dead.
“Now how is this decision made? I can’t tell you exactly because I’ve signed a confidentiality clause, so I can’t reveal the intelligence I have access to. But I can tell you that the evidence is absolute, it is 100%.”
Ruzah says interrogation of captured Hamas terrorists provides some evidence. Videos filmed by Hamas provide additional information. Forensic doctors study the videos for signs of life. The rise and fall of a chest suggests breathing. A body that remains limp as it is hit repeatedly by an angry crowd suggests death. A wound can be deemed fatal or not. Halacha, says Ruzah, relies on expert diagnoses, even when these diagnoses are based on video footage.
When there is a body, DNA is the most powerful tool for identification. For many decades, says Ruzah, rabbis were hesitant to rely on DNA because they did not understand the science behind it. But 9/11 changed that after several prominent rabbis learned the biological principles.
Dignity of the dead
Jewish tradition accords sanctity to the body. Autopsies are prohibited, except when necessary for the sake of the living, such as to apprehend a murderer. When they are carried out, damage is kept to a minimum.
Jewish tradition forbids the desecration of a human body because humans were created in the image of God. Bodies are vehicles for holy acts, which in turn imbue them with sanctity. Esoteric texts such as the Zohar teach that the body contains unique wisdom, not restricted by a finite cognition, that will be revealed in the resurrection.
Assiduous collection of all blood, bone and tendons is carried out to ensure every part of the corpse is buried, even if it means reopening the grave to add remains.
There is also a Jewish value in speedy burial out of dignity for the deceased. Ruzah says that due to the sheer numbers, burials were carried out quickly, sometimes without waiting for all the remains to be collected, unless the family insisted.
Some bodies were so completely destroyed that remains from more than one person were mistakenly buried in a single grave.
“I remember one case where after burial, we received back the CT interpretation which showed two vertebral columns,” said Ruzah.
“It turned out two people who were stuck together — either they were tied together or died hugging each other — were burned beyond recognition. We went back and separated them,” he says.
In a case involving Kibbutz Be’eri, Ruzah had to muster all of his authority, and his good relations with Religious Affairs Ministry director general Yehuda Avidan, to overcome opposition to his ruling.
Kibbutz Be’eri’s residents faced a dilemma: They wanted their dead buried in the cemetery of the kibbutz to which they planned on returning. But in the days and weeks after the attack and the ensuing war, it was too dangerous to conduct a funeral. Terrorists might still be hiding nearby or there might be another infiltration or a rocket attack.
Ruzah found a solution.
“Leaving them in refrigeration for weeks was not an option for me,” said Ruzah, “so I ruled that the deceased should be buried temporarily, and later, be transferred to Be’eri. I faced a lot of opposition, but I could not let those bodies sit like that for weeks.
“We used caskets with water-proof coverings and we left ropes tied around the caskets so it would be easy to disinter them. It’s still unclear who will pay the burial expenses, but in times of war you act first and sort out the money issues later.”
A framework for impossible situations
Ruzah’s decisions are supported by halachic precedents dating back hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. The result is a sense of continuity, says Ruzah, keeping this generation inexorably connected by tradition and a shared fate to previous generations.
“Halacha provides you with a framework, a sense of direction, in an impossible situation,” Ruzah says.
The Bar Kochba revolt, launched in 132 CE by the Jews of Judea against the Roman Empire, is one source quoted by rabbis throughout the ages. It provides a precedent for conducting a funeral and beginning the mourning process even when the body of the loved one, killed in war, lies unburied and inaccessible.
Another important precedent for burial without a body is a case in Mainz quoted by the medieval rabbi Asher Ben Yechiel (1250-1327), known as the Rosh, which is an acronym of his name.
A Jew was murdered by a wagoner with whom he was traveling, probably not an entirely unusual occurrence at a time in history that roughly coincided with the Crusades. In 1096 the Jews of Mainz, as well as the Jews of two other Rhineland Jewish communities, were massacred by Christian marauders who were on their way to Jerusalem.
The murdered man’s son, who searched for the body for an entire month before despairing and giving up, asked the opinion of Rabbi Elyakim the son of Yosef, who told him, citing an ancient Midrash, to start counting the seven days of mourning immediately.
Based on this responsum written by the Rosh, when a son or a daughter or other close relative has given up hope of ever finding the body of their loved one, they are permitted to sit shiva. Ruzah cited this ruling to justify holding a funeral for IDF soldiers or civilians whose bodies are being held by Hamas in Gaza.
Ruzah made a crucial addition of his own.
“It’s clear to me that the government is responsible for returning the body to the family. Government policy is not to negotiate with terrorists for bodies, so the government has effectively given up hope of retrieving the body and the family can sit shiva.”
Allowing the mourning process to begin — with the ripping of the mourner’s garment and the seven-day shiva — enables the family some modicum of closure. But Ruzah says ultimately he defers to the family.
“If the family does not want to sit shiva until there is a body, we don’t force them,” he says.
That was the decision made by the family of Sgt. Shaked Dahan, 19, of the 7th Armored Brigade’s 77th Battalion, from Afula. Dahan was declared dead by the IDF’s chief rabbinate, in consultation with Ruzah, six weeks after his disappearance on the day of the attack. But Dahan’s family opted to wait, out of hope that Dahan’s body would be returned.
What happens if a family decides, based on a rabbi’s decision, to conduct a funeral without a body and begins sitting shiva, and in the middle of the shiva the body is discovered? Does the family need to begin the mourning process again after the burial of the body?
This happened to the family of one of the Israelis murdered on October 7.
Ruzah discovered a little-known precedent by rabbi Yechiel Michal Epstein (1829-1908), author of the Aruch Hashulchan, that ruled the family need not start the mourning process again.
Ruzah said that one of the most heartbreaking questions he received in the past few weeks was from the father of an IDF soldier killed in battle.
The man said that he wanted to hug his son before he was buried. But the man was concerned that this was prohibited because he was a Kohen. According to tradition, members of the Jewish people’s priestly class are permitted to come into contact with the corpse of a close relative — though not others — but only on condition the body is intact.
The man had committed to donating his deceased son’s heart valves, which meant the body was not whole.
Could he still hug his son?
“I nearly cried when I heard this question,” recounts Ruzah. “Imagine what this father is worried about as his son lies dead.”
Based on a collection of responsa called Tzitz Eliezer by rabbi Eliezer Yehudah Waldenberg (1915-2006), Ruzah ruled the father could hug his son’s body. A body is considered whole as long as long as all external parts are intact. Missing internal organs does not constitute an “unwhole” body.
Asked how he has been affected by what he has been through in the past two months, Ruzah jokes, “Nothing influences me.”
Ruzah’s eyes don’t smile.
“What happened raises questions about faith. Why do we deserve this?” he says. “What’s clear is that God hit us hard. This wasn’t just a slap.”
