Burial of the 4 Jews killed last year in Paris Finally Completed

Do to the complexities of the French bureaucracy, it took over a year to complete the burial of the Jews killed in the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris.

Yoav Hattab, Phillipe Baharam, Yohan Cohen, and Francois-Michel Saada were murdered on January 9th, 2015 when Amedy Coulibay carried out a deadly attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris that Friday morning.



In an exclusive interview with "Behadrey Haredim", Menachem Peretz volunteer of Zaka France relates: “When I heard the bitter news of the death of 4 Jews in the Hyper Chacher supermarket I immediately contacted Zaka’s international hotline and asked for instructions. I was told to enter the supermarket and collect any blood or tissue belonging to the Kedoshim.

But France is not Israel. Here no one is permitted to enter the scene of an attack other than the Red Cross, the police and the fire department. We were in trouble.

We asked for the assistance of the Consistoire; Joel Mergui president of France’s Jewish community and the captain of Zaka France, Tzemach Ben Naim, president of the Chevrah Kadisha. We gathered outside Hyper Cacher on Sunday morning at around 10:00. We were finally permitted to enter at 6:00 p.m., by then the bodies were no longer there. We collected four bags of articles that needed burial and brought them the following morning to the pathology lab so that they would be buried together with the victims.

When we got there we found that the bloodied clothing the victims had died had been removed. A proper Taharah is generally not performed in the case of a violent death, and the body is buried in the bloodied clothing that had been worn at the time of death. However, when we go to the pathology lab we found that the clothing had been removed from the bodies of the victims. We therefore preformed a proper Taharah for each of the Kedoshim.

On our way out we met Harav Binyamin Hattab, father of Yoel Hattab H”YD and told him that his son’s clothes were missing, and that they needed to be located and buried. All four bodies were then flown to Israel and buried on Har HaMenuchos.

Upon investigation Harav Hattab learned that not only were his son’s clothing in the possession of the police- but that an autopsy had been performed and body parts, that needed burial had been removed. Harav Hattab filled out the necessary paper work to have everything belonging to his son released for burial. A month and a half later Harav Hattab was finally able to fly to Israel and complete his son’s burial".

This paved the way for the complete burial of the other 3 Kedoshim as well. The family of Yohan Cohen followed suit a few months later. Then Zaka took the initiative to contact the other two families and coach them through the detailed process as well. Due to a number of complications the complete process took a long time. Then finally in an obvious case of clear Divine Assistance the personal effects of the last victim of the attack were finally brought to burial in Israel this past Friday.

“Until we completed the process of fully brining each one of the Kedoshim to Kever Yisrael we felt as if we hadn’t done enough for niftarim. It weighed heavily on our hearts and gave us no rest”, said Menachem Peretz to Behadrey Haredim.

'בחדרי' גם ברשתות החברתיות - הצטרפו!