Burying the Dead, Saving the Community Jewish Burial Societies as Informal Centres of Jewish Self-Government

Abstract

This chapter briefly describes the emergence of the ḥevrah kadisha in eastern Europe within the general development of Jewish autonomy in early modern Europe and then shows how and why burial societies preserved their autonomy and their key position in the Jewish community far into the nineteenth century. To discuss this development, the chapter examines the case of the burial society in Praga, opposite Warsaw, on the eastern bank of the river Vistula. Unlike many other ḥevrot kadisha, this society was only founded in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Though the original pinkas of the burial society, which was kept from 1785 to 1870, has not survived. It was copied and provided with a Polish translation by H. Kirszenbaum and A. Fajner in 1911 and is kept today in the Central Archives of the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, together with the much shorter pinkas from Warsaw from 1875 to 1905.