Herald

Boston Herald

Exhibit Offends Jewish Traditions

You ran a piece in the Sept. 8 issue of the Journal about Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds 2 exhibit at Boston's Museum of Science. Studying cadavers may be important to medical students for the advancement of treating patients. But in my opinion, the Museum of Science's display of dead people to the public provides an entertainment frowned upon by traditional Judaism.

At Jewish funerals, the deceased is generally buried within 24 hours of death. This tradition of not delaying burial is derived from the book of Deuteronomy. "If a man will have committed a sin whose judgment is death and he shall be put to death and you shall hang him on a tree. His body shall not remain on the tree, rather you shall bury him that day, for a hanging person is an insult to G-d."

The medieval Rabbi Rashi explains the verse saying that the spectacle of the unburied corpse is an insult to G-d because a person is created "in the image of G-d."

Hersh Goldman

Swampscott