Return to Guide to Death and Mourning for Interfaith Families

Until recent decades Jews lived separately from their non-Jewish neighbors and had different burial practices. Therefore it was not a regular Jewish practice for Jews to bury non-Jews in Jewish cemeteries. Now that an increasing number of Jews are married to non-Jews, or have non-Jewish relatives, it has become more common for Jewish families to want to be buried together. Some Jewish cemeteries have worked to find a way that works with Jewish law and the sense of the community to bury people who aren’t Jewish, so that families can be buried together. For more on this, please see Planning Your Own Funeral or Someone Else’s.

The Guide to Death and Mourning for Interfaith Families is available as a PDF and our booklet Mourning the Loss of a Loved One is available for download.