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An Arizona cemetery now requires mourners to leave before burial. A rabbi plans to sue.
At Jewish funerals, the final act is often the simplest: the casket is lowered into the earth, mourners take turns with a shovel, and the grave slowly fills. It is a moment many rabbis describe as the essence of burial — the point at which ritual, grief and physical reality meet.
At a cemetery in Scottsdale, Arizona, that moment now does not happen.
A new safety policy at Paradise Memorial Gardens requires families to leave before a casket is lowered into the ground. Cemetery officials say the rule, which applies to all funerals, is necessary to prevent accidents, likely involving uneven ground, heavy equipment and mourners overcome with grief. But Jewish clergy say the policy interferes with a core religious ritual, and one local rabbi is preparing a lawsuit.
For Cindy Carpenter, 66, the dispute became painfully personal.
Her younger daughter, Chelsea, died at 33 of cancer in November. As Carpenter arranged the funeral, she and her husband purchased five burial plots at Paradise — for their two daughters, themselves and Chelsea’s husband — expecting the family would be buried together and according to Jewish practice. In total, the plots cost about $50,000, Carpenter said.
Eleven weeks later, Carpenter returned to the same cemetery to bury her older daughter, Cortney, who had significant disabilities and died at 40 after a long illness. Between the first funeral and the second, Carpenter said, the cemetery moved from compromise to refusal.
At Chelsea’s funeral, after intervention from local rabbis, mourners say they were allowed to stay but were placed around 20 feet away behind a rope while the casket was lowered. It was an imperfect accommodation Carpenter said she accepted. She understood the attempt to balance safety and tradition.
When Cortney died at the end of January, Carpenter said, that accommodation was gone. The standardized printed contract for the graveside service had added to it an additional handwritten note at the bottom stating that the casket would not be lowered until the “family has departed.” Carpenter said she was told that they had to leave the property altogether and that her request to stay inside a building at the cemetery and watch from a window was denied. Carpenter and her husband, Jim, signed under protest because the funeral was the next day.
Cindy added her own handwritten note: “I object to this awful policy,” while Jim wrote: “I acknowledge your policy & strongly object to the policy.”
“We’re grieving parents for the second time in 11 weeks,” Carpenter said in an interview. “And you’re telling me I can’t stay to see my daughter buried?”
Rabbi Pinchas Allouche of Scottsdale’s Congregation Beth Tefillah, who officiated at the funerals for both of Carpenter’s daughters, confirmed that everyone who came for Cortney’s funeral was told they could not wait in their cars and had to leave the property. “It was horrible,” Allouche said.
Afterwards, Allouche sent his 24-year-old son back into the cemetery — dressed in a baseball cap and sunglasses — to pretend to be a random person visiting a nearby grave. “From there,” Allouche said, his son “took a video of the lowering of the casket and the covering of the grave for the family to have some slice of comfort in all this.”
Cemetery officials say the rule is not aimed at any one faith. Sabrina Messinger-Acevedo, CEO and owner of Messinger Mortuaries, which operates Paradise Memorial Gardens, said the cemetery is non-denominational and that its safety policies are applied uniformly. She acknowledged the new policy does “not fully align with certain religious traditions,” but said it was adopted after past incidents in which attendees failed to follow staff directions, creating safety concerns.
Messinger Mortuaries operates multiple funeral homes, cemeteries and crematories across Arizona, including Paradise Memorial Gardens, which has a large Jewish section.
Cortney’s funeral was Feb. 3, but the dispute did not gain attention until it was reported by the local news on Feb. 16. Carpenter said the delay was due to the non-stop coverage of the Tucson disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie.
Eddie Dressler, a funeral director who has served Atlanta’s Jewish community since the 1990s, said he has never encountered a cemetery policy requiring families to leave before the lowering of a casket. “Having a rule like that is just crazy,” Dressler said.
The only similar restrictions he has seen are at some U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs cemeteries, which open multiple graves at once for logistical reasons — but even there, he said, exceptions are typically made for Jewish burial practices.
Safety and spirituality
Allouche said the rule removes what Jewish law considers the defining moment of burial. The lowering of the casket and the covering of the grave, he said, are not symbolic gestures but the final act of care for the dead — one traditionally performed with mourners present and often participating.
Allouche said he is working with an attorney and expects to challenge the policy, arguing that families who purchased plots in the cemetery did so with the expectation they would be able to bury loved ones according to Jewish practice. Applying the rule without exception, he said, effectively prevents that.
Rabbi Randy Brown, the resident rabbi at Arlington National Cemetery who has officiated at more than 900 funerals there, said safety concerns at gravesides are real. He has personally helped prevent people from falling in “dozens of times.”
But Brown said most cemeteries do not impose blanket bans. Instead, clergy, funeral directors and grounds crews typically coordinate accommodations, such as keeping families at a distance during the lowering and allowing them to return afterward to place earth on the grave, a practice that preserves both safety and ritual meaning.
Graveside funerals, he said, function both as sacred ritual and, with bulldozer equipment nearby, active work sites. Arlington, he added, approaches each burial individually — considering weather, terrain and family needs — rather than applying a single policy to every service.
Brown described the moment when earth strikes the casket as emotionally powerful for many mourners, recalling his own experience at his grandmother’s funeral as “visceral and cosmic.” That meaning, he said, is why cemeteries and clergy typically seek practical compromises. “It’s not one size fits all,” he said.
Religious disputes have surfaced elsewhere. In Atlanta in 2023, for example, a synagogue threatened to sue after a cemetery policy was seen by rabbis as interfering with Jewish burial customs. The cemetery eventually settled.
Allouche said he expects legal action to move forward. Some families who own plots at the cemetery have begun reconsidering their plans, he said, while others are waiting to see whether the cemetery revises its rules or reaches a compromise with community leaders.
Messinger-Acevedo said her company — founded in 1959 by her grandparents, Paul and Cora Messinger — has “deep roots in the community” and a commitment to serve families with “care and compassion.” She said they offer “partial refunds to families who choose to rescind the purchase of an unused burial space” — a complex decision for those with relatives already buried at the cemetery.
Carpenter said the dispute is not something she wanted to fight, but one she felt compelled to pursue. Nearly two decades ago, she founded Cortney’s Place, a day program for adults with disabilities created in her older daughter’s honor, and is now working with local clergy to create “Shabbat boxes” for Jewish patients in hospitals — small packages with challah, candles and grape juice inspired by Chelsea.
“I fought for them all of their life,” Carpenter said. “And this is no different.”
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My irrational, possibly problematic obsession with an $85 yarmulke
Growing up, we had a rule of thumb about yarmulkes: the closer yours was to your forehead, the more strictly religious you were. The frum bochurim placed theirs practically on their noses; the boys from Conservative families bobby-pinned their kippahs on the back of their heads, like climbers gripping a rockface. The cool kids, of course, stuffed theirs in their pockets.
The Jewish skullcap, in other words, was a signifier of much more than the religious precept it embodied. Over the years not only a yarmulke’s positioning but also its style, size and material have come to place its wearer somewhere on a continuum of Jewish identity. Trends in yarmulke wearing, then, may tell us a story about where Judaism is — forgive me — headed.
So what kind of Jew wears an $85 yarmulke, and what kind of Judaism demands it? These questions gnawed at me when I first learned about Rubenstein Paris, a new kippah couturier whose ads found me on Instagram. Available in a range of expensive-looking solid colors (copper, cream, sapphire) and fabrics (velvet, corduroy, even horsehair), these kippahs are here to replace your tattered souvenirs.
“Everybody’s just walking around with their kippot from — I don’t know, Mendel and Rachel’s wedding, 2019,” Jonathan Hirsch, Rubenstein’s German-Israeli founder, told me recently. “I was like, ‘It’s such a sacred item, you know? Why isn’t there any beautiful kippah, that you can really acknowledge for what it is?’”
He’s onto something. Even as an image-conscious, Shabbat-observant millennial, I had largely neglected the yarmulke; when I wanted to look sharp, I ditched it. I was not completely out on Jew-caps, to be sure — like every other frat boy who thought Mac Miller was Moses, I went through a vintage snapback phase in college. But when I’ve had to clip up, I’ve made do with whatever I had lying around — usually something suede, dark, and folded more times than an origami fortune teller.
Hirsch offered to send a freebie, but at $85, accepting it felt compromising. The loaner we agreed to instead came in a branded drawstring bag, which was accompanied by a sleek black storage box. Though I’d secretly hoped for the horsehair model, the kippah Hirsch sent was more utilitarian: a ribbed velvet, golden brown, with the rise and structural integrity of one of those dome-houses you see in Architectural Digest. Velvet piping twisted around its circumference; its cloth inner lining depicted a globe and a shofar.
I put it on.
Skullcap semiotics
The story of the kippah begins in the Talmud, when 3rd-century sage Rav Huna proclaimed that he never walked more than four cubits without his head covered to symbolize that the divine presence was always above him. After rabbinic law codified the practice in the 1500s, the kippah evolved into a marker of Jewish cultural mores.
For example, 20 years ago, most Modern Orthodox boys wore black suede kippahs, but today, as people debate whether Modern Orthodoxy is dead, suede is disappearing, replaced by black velvet, the standard among Haredi Jews, and the kippah sruga — the crocheted yarmulke associated with the Israeli Religious Zionist movement. Pluralism out, orthodoxy in.
But it’s also a fraught moment to be displaying any marker of Jewish identity. Wearing a kippah in public makes you subject to a certain type of attention these days: the glare of being Jewish at a time when the Jewish state is embroiled in enormously unpopular and destructive wars. Hirsch, who is 29 and lives in Berlin, knows this firsthand — these days he doesn’t feel safe wearing a kippah in public.
And yet I suspect that growing Jewish isolation also puts the lie to our assimilation fantasies; it makes us more likely to wear the things that attach us to each other. Indeed, there is a renaissance in Judaica today driven by new designers and younger consumers finding joy in their heritage. The name Rubenstein is a play on Hirsch’s middle name, Reuven. But he also just thought it sounded cool.
All about the Benyamins
First ironically, then with some resignation, I found that the Rubenstein was the only kippah I wanted to wear — my fancy kippah became my everyday kippah. Putting it on was a daily treat — I was humored by the upgrade. I began picturing how gloomy and shallow life would be without it. I debated the unthinkable — ponying up to keep the loaner.
I was still conflicted about the idea of the object, which felt like a metaphor for the sticker-shock that accompanies Jewish life, especially Orthodox life, in the U.S. today. There’s the skyrocketing cost of real estate in Jewish neighborhoods, the eyewatering day school tuition, even the price of kosher meat and grape juice. Was it an $85 kippah, or a yeshiva-league Sorting Hat?
I put the questions to Hirsch. There are very few ritual objects, he pointed out, from the kiddush cup to candlesticks to one’s tallit, that we pride ourselves on buying cheap. Why should kippot be the exception? “You’re giving your humility a bigger meaning,” he said, “by the fact that you’re wearing this on your head.”
It was true — I felt more humble than ever before, and expected others to acknowledge my commitment and my sophistication. I can see you are a man of taste, they would say, presumably lowering a monocle. (I would nod, then dip my double-dark chocolate Milano cookie into a steaming teacup.)
It was true my designer yarmulke was not the conversation starter I’d anticipated. Only one person complimented me on it unprompted — that singular infallible judge of quality, my mother. Everyone else, I’m certain, was stealing covetous glances. But they didn’t need to praise, ask about, or even notice my beloved yarmulke, which I’m sure I’ll return soon. The premium fabrics, the shofar in the lining and the devotion it all symbolized were between me and Hashem.
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How Iran is outsourcing terror plots against Jews
The prosecution of an Iraqi national in connection with thwarted alleged terror plots in the U.S. and Europe has put the behind-the-scenes role of Iran in the spotlight — part of what security experts say is a growing and hard-to-trace threat.
Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi national accused of ties to an Iran-backed militia, pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court this week to charges linking him to a series of attacks and alleged terror plots targeting American interests and Jewish communities in Europe and the United States.
Prosecutors allege Al-Saadi was connected to attacks, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in London’s heavily Jewish Golders Green neighborhood and an arson attack on a synagogue in North Macedonia. They also accuse him of attempting to recruit individuals online to firebomb synagogues in New York, Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona.
He also reportedly planned to attack Ivanka Trump, who is both the president’s daughter and an Orthodox Jew — making her a “double target,” in the words of Oren Segal, vice president at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.
Iranian attacks on Jewish and Israeli institutions abroad are not new. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran and its proxies have targeted diplomats, Jews, Israelis, political dissidents and others perceived as aligned with the West.
Matthew Levitt, director of the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, maintains a detailed database of such attacks. He told the Forward that since the current war began, such plots have significantly increased.
The Al-Saadi case is a prime example of what Levitt calls Iran’s “gig economy” model of terrorism. Rather than dispatching trained operatives directly from Iran, Iranian-linked actors and proxy groups are recruiting individuals online who live in the country they wish to target. Some are not even aware they are attacking on behalf of Iran or its proxies.
In court filings, prosecutors allege that Al-Saadi, who prosecutors link to the terror organization Kata’ib Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, sent maps and photographs of a prominent Manhattan synagogue and other Jewish institutions to an undercover agent he was attempting to recruit to firebomb them. He allegedly offered the agent $10,000 in cryptocurrency in exchange for carrying out the plot, and discussed whether the recruit should “set the place on fire” or use an improvised explosive device.
Iranian-linked operatives, who are either part of Iran’s security apparatus or within its network of terror proxies, reach out to potential recruits on encrypted platforms like Telegram.
According to Levitt, the operatives are ordered by “very senior” elements of the Iranian regime to find recruits. “It stretches the limits of credulity to think that plots like this in the United States could be done without very senior top-down instruction,” Levitt said. “These are not rogue actors.”
Those they manage to recruit online are often financially motivated, agreeing to carry out attacks like vandalism, surveillance, or assaults in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. Others appear driven by ideology or online radicalization. Over the years, Iran’s recruits have included teenagers as young as 13.
“These are inexpensive plots,” said Levitt. “It requires just a few people to sit at a computer and try to recruit people and direct people.”
For Iran, this method is particularly strategic amid wartime. “Iran can’t go toe to toe with the U.S. or Israeli militaries, but it can engage in these asymmetric plots to show that they can still reach out and touch us to increase the cost of continuing to prosecute the war and to make people feel afraid,” said Levitt.
By relying on online recruits and loosely connected operatives, Levitt says Iranian-linked actors can obscure their involvement and maintain reasonable deniability. The calculation, he explained, is that authorities will be satisfied with arresting and prosecuting the individual carrying out the attack, rather than blaming Iran. This allows Iran to limit the risk of direct military escalation with the United States while continuing to conduct operations against it.
The Online Battlefield
According to Segal, Iranian influence increasingly permeates online.
“The threat to Jewish communities right now is multidimensional — Iranian-linked plots, cyberattacks, online propaganda,” he said. “They’re all converging at once, making it one of the more complex threat environments for the Jewish community in a long time.”
For years, Iranian state media outlets such as Press TV have targeted Western audiences with antisemitic content, including Holocaust denial, claims that Zionists control world events and other extremist narratives. A 2023 report by the ADL and the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Press TV receives roughly one million monthly visits, with more than half of its traffic coming from Western countries.
Segal said Iranian-linked propaganda networks also increasingly operate in online spaces that overlap with broader activist communities. One such example is Resistance News Network, a Telegram channel with over 150,000 subscribers frequented by members of pro-Palestinian activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. The channel is filled with official Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi propaganda that is then reshared by American activists on mainstream social media accounts.
“What that does is enable the exchange of ideas, of propaganda, and of narrative that we then see show up at actual events on the ground,” he said.
Segal argues that exposure to such propaganda can make recruitment efforts easier.
“Our concerns are not only from somebody who may have been placed here or somewhere in Europe,” said Segal, “but from individuals who are animated by the propaganda they ingest every single day.”
Levitt agreed, stating that rising antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment since the outbreak of the Gaza war has created a larger pool of individuals who may view attacks on Jewish or Zionist targets as justified.
“A lot of people are going to be much more willing to do something … especially if it’s not actually killing someone, but fire bombing something and/or targeting property that has symbolic value,” he said.
But the threat is not limited to physical violence.
Since the war began, Segal said Iranian-linked cyberattacks have “gone into overdrive.”
He says Jewish organizations and media outlets have faced hacking attempts on their websites, while Jewish individuals have had their identities stolen, with personal information being exposed online in mass doxxing campaigns.
Many such attacks are conducted by Iranian hacking collectives. One of the most notorious among them is Iranian hacker group Handala Hackers, which has conducted several attacks against Jews, Israelis and Americans. The FBI reported that in March, the group claimed to have stolen 851 gigabytes of confidential data from Sanzer Hasidic Jewish community members, which the hackers described as “documents of financial cooperation, witchcraft ceremonies, and secret correspondences with Netanyahu …” They added, “We warn the leaders and members of the Sanzer Hasidic community: No place is safe for you. Betrayal of the oppressed leads to nothing but disgrace and shame. Expect more documents to be revealed.”
Despite the growing number of plots, experts say the relative lack of successful attacks inside the United States reflects the effectiveness of American counterterrorism efforts.
Still, Jewish communities across the United States are investing heavily in security upgrades. Asher Lopatin, director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, said synagogues in Michigan have increased security following a March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield by a Hezbollah-linked man. Communities are installing bollards, expanding surveillance systems, and hiring additional guards.
“People are definitely doubling up on security,” Lopatin said. “Everyone is traumatized.”
Levitt says that even after the war concludes, he does not expect the plots targeting American interests and Jews to cease.
“I do not think that when the war ends, these necessarily stop,” Levitt said. “The pace may change, but Iran has a distinct interest in exacting revenge for all the damage that was done to it.”
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They helped elect Los Angeles’ first Black mayor; but to him, they were just Bob and Shirley
When Joshua Silverstein, a Black Jewish theater artist, was growing up in Los Angeles, he recalls one Ashkenazi couple, to whom he refers as Bob and Shirley, that had a particularly profound effect on him.
Bob and Shirley were the type of people who greeted everyone they saw on the street; Silverstein grew up going to their get-togethers that were welcome to everyone in the neighborhood. They loved music and literature, they were “way into Theodore Bikel,” and they had a plethora of Billie Holiday records.
Bob and Shirley were also instrumental in the fight to elect Los Angeles’ first Black mayor, Thomas Bradley.
“LA’s Bob and Shirley,” which Silverstein wrote and is performing as part of a new theater compilation of Jewish stories, begins in 1946 when the couple moved to the west coast from New Jersey. Bob was a carpenter — he had wanted to be a professor, but his Jewish background made it challenging to get hired at a university. Instead, he constructed buildings across Los Angeles, only to find out that the same apartments he worked on didn’t allow Jews or other minorities to live there.
The couple ended up near Central Avenue, an epicenter of African-American culture where they rubbed shoulders with legendary Black performers and intellectuals — Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes and W.E.B Dubois. The neighborhood was in danger, though; real estate agents were pressuring residents to leave so their properties could be refurbished and sold to white homeowners.
Together, Bob and Shirley co founded the Alta Loma Democratic Club, where Thomas Bradley began to show up to meetings. At the time, he was a lieutenant in the police department who, as a Black man, experienced bigotry of his own. Bradley had a vision to preserve the neighborhood, and inspired by Bradley’s vision and spirit, Bob and Shirley encouraged Bradley to run for city council.
“At first he said no,” Silverstein said. But Bob told Bradley, “If you do it, we will get you elected.”
If it hadn’t been for the Alta Loma Democratic Club, “Tom Bradley would not have then gone on to be mayor,” Silverstein said. “LA being this place where we feel like it’s diverse took a lot of work, and this is because of what Tom Bradley did.” His 20-year term was the longest in Los Angeles’ history.
Silverstein’s piece is just one of the many stories told in L’Chaim America, a commemoration of the United States’ 250th anniversary produced by The Braid, a Los Angeles theater company with the mission of telling Jewish stories.
“Our show is really a celebration of the diversity that makes up what America is. It is this beautiful love letter to the hope for the future,” Silverstein told me.
The Braid is a story-telling theater, and L’Chaim America is a minimalist production. Armed only with binders and their words, performers share stories commissioned by writers or solicited from community members: Author Emily Bowen Cohen explores her dual Jewish and Native American identities, Solomon Dueñas, an El Salvadoran immigrant, reconnects with his Jewish roots. Silverstein is the only writer performing his own work.
Silverstein told me his mission was twofold: He hoped to share an untold piece of Los Angeles’ history and, having Black and Jewish identities himself, to shed light on the historic Black-Jewish alliance.
“What people don’t hear often is how there were Ashkenazi Jews who were radical in their support of Blackness and other marginalized voices,” he said.
Until he started researching his piece, Silverstein never fully understood the role Bob and Shirley played in Los Angeles’ history. For him, and for members of the audience who knew and loved people like Bob and Shirley, Silverstein’s piece was a way of appreciating what they managed to achieve.
“The coalition that came together to get him elected to mayor was a coalition of Jewish people,” Silverstein said. “This wasn’t about religion. It wasn’t about culture. It wasn’t about ethnicity. It was about human beings recognizing that this is a city they love and to come together to change it for the good.”
Silverstein believes his work is significant in how “it recognizes the ugly,” but does not shy away from it in order to reveal a more realistic, yet more inspiring, picture of America. This America requires looking “at the areas that have been challenging — at the areas that have been hard and terrible — and not closing our eyes to it, but promising to do better.”
“L’Chaim America” is being performed in theaters in and across Los Angeles through June 17. On June 7, the Skirball Cultural Center will host a special production of the performance as part of a community-wide celebration in partnership with other Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and the Jews of Color Initiative. Additional performances will be held in Irvine on June 28 and in New York City on July 12.
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