GEN419 The intensity of Judaism’s opposition to cremation is fueled by several factors.  Most significantly, because the body, though now dead, once housed the soul, it is believed to retain certain sanctity.  A second reason is an emotional one, rooted in recent Jewish historical experience.  Burning bodies is what the Nazis did to the Jews after they gassed them, and cremation, fairly or unfairly, remains associated in the psyche of many Jews with the Nazis’ behavior.  What the Nazis did to Jewish bodies, many feel, Jews must not do to themselves or to each other.  Rabbi Eli Spitz articulates an additional reason not to cremate, which he terms “concern for the welfare of the mourner.’  In Spitz’s words: “Burial helps the mourner by providing a sense of closure.  When the mourner sees the coffin being lowered into the earth and when he hears the sound of pebbles and soil hitting the coffin, it hurts terribly, but from that moment on, he knows that death is real … Cremation always takes place out of sight of the family, for it is a violent act.  And so, for the mourner, there is no act that marks closure.  A grave is an address to which a family can come ever afterward in order to commune with its memories.”  Spitz, Why Bury? In Reimer, Jewish Insights on Death and Mourning, 125-126. TELVOL 1:101-102