Mother Will Be Mummified, Not Frozen

They had hoped to freeze their mother’s body until the day medical technology could bring her back to life.

But after 14 days of uncertainty and court hearings, Moshe and Rachel Beeri agreed Tuesday to mummify their mother instead.

Esther Beeri, 70, died two weeks ago of natural causes.

The siblings finally agreed to mummify her after realizing there was no way in Israel to keep the body on ice or to bury it in frozen ground.

“They were very sad,” said their attorney, Nachshon Fisher.

“They accepted this only because there was really no other choice. They wanted this more than anything, for their mother to be frozen in order to give her a chance to come back to life someday.”

The Israeli burial society and Health Ministry opposed the siblings’ request to keep the body at home in a special freezer they bought for the purpose.

They accepted the Beeris’ new proposal to preserve the body in a special oil and wrap it in thick nylon before burial, Fisher said.

In any case, freezing was no longer an option because the body, kept for the past two weeks at a medical center in the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon, was not on ice and the decaying process had already begun, Fisher said.

Fisher said the case raised issues “the system was not ready or willing to deal with,” including the question of whether freezing a body violates Jewish law.

Tel Aviv District Court magistrate Amiram Binyamini said in his ruling Tuesday that he was “convinced this was not just eccentrism, but rather a difficult and sensitive problem of the defendants.”