Rabbi Sues Pennsylvania State Board of Funeral Directors

August 10, 2012 -- All he wants to do is officiate at Jewish funerals. Is that so wrong?

Depending on whom you ask, it might be. So Rabbi Daniel E. Wasserman is going all the way to federal court for the right to perform funeral rites.

Wasserman, an Orthodox rabbi with Shaare Torah Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pa., near Pittsburgh, filed a lawsuit on Monday in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania against the state board of funeral directors and other state officials. The suit accuses the board of violating the religious freedom of the state's clergy.

According to the 41-page complaint, Wasserman is "being threatened with civil action and criminal prosecution … for conducting religious funerals in place of licensed funeral directors who, under color of state law, interfere in purely religious observances for no other justification than personal profit."

"The State Board of Funeral Directors selectively enforces Pennsylvania's Funeral Director Law in a way that violates the religious freedom of the state's clergy, and all of the religious persons they serve," said Wasserman's lawyer, Efrem M. Grail, of Reed Smith LLP. "This suit seeks to restore religious persons and their chosen leaders' traditional right to practice their faith free from state intervention and harassment, while adhering to all applicable regulations of the Commonwealth's Department of Health."

According to Wasserman, who is the leader for funerary practice for the Pittsburgh Board of Orthodox rabbis, the Vaad Harabonim, he has been threatened with fines of up to $10,000 and imprisonment for conducting religious funerals in the place of commercial funeral directors.

In late 2009 he received a warning letter from a licensed funeral director after conducting a funeral ceremony. Wasserman was accused of breaking the law by not having a licensed funeral director there during the services. The director subsequently sent his letter of complaint to the board of funeral directors and "a number of other prominent funeral homes in Pittsburgh, including ones that primarily serve the Jewish community," the complaint says.

In May 2010, Wasserman was contacted by an investigator from the Pennsylvania Bureau of Enforcement and told he was being investigated for "practicing as a funeral director without a license." After that, some cemeteries tried to bar him from performing religious rites without the involvement of a funeral home.

Families have told the rabbi that they have been informed by funeral directors that the funeral and burial services he performs might be illegal. "There has been a significant chilling effect throughout the Orthodox Jewish community in Pittsburgh with respect to rabbis' right to carry out ritual preparation, burial, and mourning of a deceased person according to our interpretation of Jewish law, tradition, custom and practice," he said.

Jewish law requires that funerals be conducted within 24 hours of death by a rabbi. (Rabbis are forbidden from becoming licensed funeral directors because that requires learning to embalm, which is forbidden under Jewish law.) "Every person must be buried the same way, with the same casket, the same shroud, the same service," he said.