 Michael Gutwein, a volunteer who heads the litigious arm of the anti-autopsy crusade. Photo by Jonathan Bloom
Yoel Greuss, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, sits in his 19th century, impoverished home (right away, the ultra-Orthodox Jew is being portrayed as archaic living in old 19th century homes and he's in poverty, connoting that he's a drain on the finances of the Israel economy, even though this article has nothing to do about finances) in Jerusalem’s Meah Shearim quarter, grinning (like he's proud of his life in crime, and the fact that he gets away with it. Like the Shylock, a creature of darkness, a bogeyman, a grinning devil) as he talks of his adventures.
“A few years ago (how is an isolated event that happened a few years ago, with an unidentified man, relevant to events that are going on today?), there was a man lying dead in his bed, a Charedi [ultra-Orthodox], and the police came. They wanted to take the body for an autopsy, and everybody was inside the apartment trying to stop them, and there was a crowd outside, and somebody distracted the police, and a few of us grabbed the body, wrapped in it in the sheet, and ran outside,” says Greuss, a member of Neturei Karta, (affiliating this ultra-Orthodox "charedi" with the rabidly anti-Zionistic group is horrific) the most extreme of all the ultra-Orthodox sects, the one that hates Zionism so much its leaders buddy up with Ahmadinejad and Louis Farrakhan (so at this point in time, the reader is already livid with our charedi ultra-Orthodox Jew because of Neturei Karta's affiliation with Ahmadinejad and Louis Farrakhan, which again, has absolutely nothing to do with this story) .
“This was in Meah Shearim with all the little alleys, right?” he goes on, sitting at his dining room table, a wall of holy books behind him. “The police run outside and ask the crowd which way we went, and they tell them, ‘That way,’ and the police run that way. Meanwhile, we went the other way. We put the body in a car and drove it to a cemetery and buried it.”
I ask him where, and he tilts his head back, a thin smile on his face — no comment.
Israel’s Charedim are known for their ability to mobilize tens, or hundreds, of thousands of screaming protesters, to burn garbage bins, to throw stones at police, (wow. In one sentence, the writer summoned up disparate protests and lumped them all in one) all for the sake of closing a street on Shabbat, or stopping developers from digging up ancient Jewish graves, or forcing advertisers to take down “pornographic” billboards — or advancing some other holy cause (how condescending and minimizing the reasons for the protests). But for the great mitzvah of preventing autopsies, which they consider a desecration of the dead, Charedi activists over the decades have gone so far as to snatch fresh corpses (now we are body snatchers)(note the sarcasm of the writer: "all for the sake of"(advancing some holy cause""But for the great Mitzvah of") — usually with the help of a fired-up, intimidating crowd (making them sound like mindless zealots) — before the dead could be taken to the coroner’s office in Tel Aviv. By and large a Jerusalem phenomenon, the bodies are buried in a local cemetery, the grave’s location known only to the gravediggers, a few Charedi higher-ups and the immediate family of the deceased (this is whole-sale slander on the frum community. I challenge anyone to get free burial spots in any Jerusalem cemetery. You can't. They are exorbitantly expensive, and no one is giving them away just to hide the evidence from the police.).
In the past, this was the Charedim’s tactic of choice ("tactic of choice?" We use tactics as one general group?) against autopsies. But in recent years, they’ve all but stopped stealing corpses, because they don’t have to (then why does the reporter talk about what allegedly happened in the past?) — the police and courts don’t want riots on their hands, so now, unless an autopsy is absolutely necessary to determine the exact cause of death, an activist’s call to a police station or a court petition is usually enough to bypass the coroner’s office. (Wait a minute! If the Israeli coroner's office is no longer currently pursuing autopsies because our activists are calling the police station or petitioning the courts, then why is this writer reporting about events in the past?)
“I do not enjoy having to fight the Charedim,” Dr. Jehuda Hiss, Israel’s chief coroner since 1987, says in an interview in one of the autopsy rooms at the L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, known to all as Abu Kabir, the gritty South Tel Aviv neighborhood where it’s located. (wait a minute! Why is he fighting the Charedim, when the Israeli coroner's office is no longer currently pursuing autopsies because our activists are calling the police station or petitioning the courts?)
Fights over autopsies almost always concern a corpse of a religious Jew or Muslim; secular people don’t ordinarily object. So Hiss still has plenty of work. “We did 15 bodies today,” he said on one recent evening.
In Tel Aviv’s courthouse, Michael Gutwein, a volunteer who heads the litigious arm of the anti-autopsy crusade, explains why cutting up dead bodies is such a sin. “In the Shulchan Arukh [the main source book on Jewish law], it says that after death, the soul, which lives on inside the dead body, feels every little injury ‘like 1,000 needles.’ So you can imagine what an autopsy feels like,” he says. “That’s why we care so much — out of respect for the dead.” (Had the JJ had any journalistic integrity, he would have presented this Orthodox viewpoint at the beginning of the article, thus framing the issues properly. But instead, the Orthodox view was tucked in the end of the article, after the character assassinations and stereotypes of Orthodox Jews were made.)
He recalls a recent case that went to the Supreme Court — a construction worker in Rehovot was run over by a tractor, and state prosecutors wanted an autopsy performed on the body for insurance purposes — to see if the tractor killed him or if he died from a pre-existing heart condition. The dead man was a secular bachelor, but his next of kin were newly religious Jews (what possible difference does it make whether the relatives were FFB's or BT's?). They contacted the anti-autopsy movement; Gutwein filed a court petition, and, by the next day, state prosecutors had backed off. (why didn't the JJ start off with presenting the Orthodox petitioner who proceeded within the law to get things done, rather than starting the article with deviant behavior allegedly by the ultra-Orthodox charedim?). Gutwein displays the Supreme Court ruling, which concludes, “The autopsy will not be performed,” and is signed by Justice Hanan Meltzer. The secular construction worker, his soul spared the 1,000 needles, received a proper ultra-Orthodox burial.
 Dr. Jehuda Hiss, Israel’s chief coroner since 1987. Photo by Jonathan Bloom
Gutwein points out, though, that if Charedi activists are convinced by authorities that an autopsy is necessary to help identify a murderer or stop the spread of disease, they won’t oppose it. “This is also in line with Jewish law,” he says. (So now the Charedim are viewed as rational and law-abiding citizens. But at this point in time in the article, the cast was died and the Charedim were already tarred and feathered as criminals).
At 43, Gutwein lives in Bnei Brak, Israel’s most Charedi city, and it is his job to arrange funerals. He got involved in caring for the dead about 20 years ago. “I had a friend who drove a hearse who got injured, and he asked me to fill in for him. Things just went on from there,” he says.
Noting that he’s stopped “hundreds, if not thousands of autopsies” by peaceful, legal means, Gutwein refers to Greuss and his crew as “fanatics.” He recalls once stepping into the breach between police and a raging crowd of Neturei Karta and the like-minded Toldot Aharon sect in the Charedi town of El’ad.
“A young woman died of a drug overdose; there was no suspicion of foul play, but the police wanted to take the body for an autopsy, and Greuss had bused in a crowd from Jerusalem and Ramat Beit Shemesh [an ideological suburb of Meah Shearim]. They were in the street yelling, ‘Murderers! Nazis! Gevalt!’ — what the fanatics usually yell.
“We negotiated with the police to call off the autopsy, and to let us have the body to drive to the cemetery so everybody would go home,” Gutwein continues. “We put the body in one of our ambulances; I start to drive away, and the crazies (what Jewish paper calls Charedim "crazies?") see me and start screaming that I’m driving it [to] Abu Kabir! I told them I’m driving the body to the cemetery, and they wouldn’t believe me; they yelled that I was lying; they broke the ambulance’s mirrors and windows.”
Back in his cluttered, peeling apartment in Meah Shearim (is it relevant to this story to portray the Charedi as living in dilapidated and non-livable squalor?), Greuss explains how he gets the commotion started. If police and paramedics pull up to an apartment in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Ramat Beit Shemesh or some other ultra-Orthodox community, he hears about it immediately on his beeper, cell phone, Mirs or other gadget. If the ambulance is there to pick up a dead body, Greuss calls out the troops.
“I call five guys, each of them calls five guys, and so on. In 15 minutes we have a crowd of 1,000 people,” he says (here we go. The orthodox mob stereotype).
Greuss, 38, says he ran off with his first corpse in his late teens. “I didn’t like studying in yeshiva, so I dropped out at 16. I didn’t have anything to do, then I got a job guarding graves at [Jerusalem’s] Shamgar cemetery,” he says (so they portray the Charedi hooligan as a Yeshiva dropout, with nothing to do but cause trouble, who doesn't like learning Torah). A couple of years later, there was a ruckus at the cemetery between police who wanted to take the body of a young Charedi man for an autopsy and the crowd that wanted to prevent it.
“This was about 1 or 2 in the morning, and in the middle of all this, the body was laying there, covered, on a gurney,” he recalls. “We have a saying — ‘no corpse, no autopsy.’ So I wheeled the body out of the cemetery, stopped a car [driven by a Charedi man], put the body in the back, and we drove away and just sat there with it. There was a court case going on against the autopsy, and people were demonstrating outside the judge’s house in the middle of the night. Next thing you know, the judge cancels the autopsy, and we drove the body back to Shamgar and they buried it.”
By now, because of the Charedim’s power in the streets and courts, the theft of dead bodies before autopsy is down to about one a year, or even less (did you catch that? The evil Charedim now have the ability to change legislation because they burn garbage in the dumpsters). The most notorious instance in recent years came in May 2006, when the body of 1-year-old Malka Sitner, daughter of American immigrant Charedi parents, was stolen from the refrigerator of Ashdod cemetery and driven off for burial — while some 250 police tried to hold off a crowd of more than 1,000 Charedim, some of whom were throwing stones and breaking windows.
Police had wanted the autopsy to see if the parents had been negligent in their care of the girl. Greuss, who has managed to stay out of prison(that crafty Charedi, how he manages to stay out of prison, notwithstanding his life of crime) but who is under police investigation for a caper or two, freely acknowledges that he was at Ashdod cemetery that day and that he dispatched a few busloads of demonstrators, but says he had nothing to do with the corpse-snatching itself.
However, he allows that during the melee, “Somebody asked me if I could give him five guys. He didn’t tell me for what, and I gave him five guys.” He also says he heard later from one of the corpse-snatchers about how it had gone down.
“One young guy stood at the entrance of the women’s bathroom, like he was guarding the women’s privacy, but inside there were a few men, and one of them had a crowbar, and he climbed up the wall, broke the window and climbed down into the next room where the refrigerator was. He broke open the refrigerator door, took out the little girl’s body, pushed it through the window down to the guys on the other side, and they ran out of the bathroom with it.
“They put it in a car and sent the car off while some other Charedim set up a decoy,” he says. “These other men loaded something that was sort of the shape of a corpse and wrapped in a prayer shawl into the back of a car and drove off. Naturally, the police followed them. When the police stopped their car and saw there was no body inside the shawl, they beat up the driver, they were so mad,” Greuss says, smiling (so maybe there was no body theft? But according to this ill-defined story, the Charedim were as guilty as hell for stealing the bodies - that were never found).
By this time, the men driving the body of Malka Sitner were headed out of Ashdod. “They were in the last car to drive out of the exit before police set up a barricade and started checking every car coming through,” he says. “You see? God protects us.” (So now, they are invoking God to enable their life of crime. Do you see hhow the secular Jew reads this and processes this story? How the Charedim are pure devious and evil???)
In an unprepossessing office near Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav also smiles as he recounts how he “stole bodies from the morgue at Hadassah, we opened the front door of Abu Kabir and threw rats inside. I was young, 18.”
Meshi-Zahav, 51, who resembles a Charedi reincarnation of James Cagney, used to be the chief agitator of the Jerusalem community, organizing all the wild demonstrations against autopsies and every other abomination, but, over the years, he became legitimate (aha, as a Charei he was illegitimate). He now heads the well-respected Orthodox volunteer organization ZAKA (Hebrew acronym for “Disaster Victims Identification”), whose main work is to gather the remains of the dead for burial, notably at terror attacks, but which also coordinates the legal side of the anti-autopsy movement.
“Autopsies are becoming a thing of the past,” he says. “It’s all going to be done noninvasively, by MRI.” Indeed, Israel’s first forensic MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine went into use in early August at Assaf Harofeh Medical Center, near Ben-Gurion Airport. In the first two weeks, six autopsies were performed, he said. ZAKA even helped raise the money to buy it, Meshi-Zahav says. (Wait a minute. If there are no longer autopsies done and the investigations are done by MRI, why the whole fuss and why the whole attack on Charedim?)
On this subject, at least, Hiss and the Charedim are in agreement. “If you use the MRI together with the CT scan, toxicological tests and tissue sampling, you can get results almost as precise as from an autopsy,” Israel’s chief coroner says. “This is the wave of the future — autopsy by non-invasive means, or ‘virtopsy,’ as it’s called.”
Virtopsy has also been used in Switzerland and England, and Hiss, 65, is greatly relieved that Israel is joining the club. “After nearly 25 years of fighting ZAKA and the Charedim, I’m worn out,” he says. “They’ve won.” |
