In the months following the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic there has been renewed attention given to what had previously been an obscure and long-forgotten Jewish ceremony. On March 18, 2020, a wedding took place at the Ponevezh cemetery in the city of Bnei Brak in Israel. It was reported in the Israeli press, and drone footage documented a huppa erected next to the wall of the cemetery, with a few dozen onlookers carefully weaving their way among the fresh graves.
Such a wedding acquired an unforgettable moniker: It was known in Yiddish as a shvartse khasene, a “black wedding,” and is sometimes referred to as a “cholera wedding” or a “plague wedding.”
The story travelled widely, and the ceremony has since been reported in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on various blogs and websites. This unexpected attention to a little-known and often controversial Jewish response to pandemics raises many questions. What were its origins, how widespread was it, and what might be the halakhic and philosophical implications of this striking, and admittedly, bizarre ceremony? This paper, long in preparation before the COVID pandemic, is an attempt at some answers.
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