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During the past holidays we had some old friends come from out of town to stay with us aboard our boat. He remarked how he thought I’d done a great job with the woodwork, cabinetry and furniture I’d built during the boat’s restoration. During our conversation he mentioned that he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and didn’t have much time left, and if I could build him a coffin. To say I was flabbergasted was an understatement. He said he’d feel better if he knew the coffin had been built by a friend. I did tell him I knew nothing about how kosher coffins.were constructed. (The last funeral I’d been to had been my shver’s, and of course it was covered with a tallis, and I wasn’t about to go and peek.) I asked our rabbi, but all he could tell me was that it had to be all wood with no metal nails. Does anyone here know how kosher coffins are constructed? I’m not trying to sound macabre or the like. I’d honestly like to know. The only funeral director here who does traditional Jewish funerals orders his coffins from New York already constructed..
The less and the simpler the better; plain and wooden. The bottom should preferably be removable so it can be slid out.
That being said, it seems inappropriate to prepare one for a living person.
Check with the chevra kadisha
Why is it inappropriate? People buy burial plots as a segula for arichas yomim. Some have a minhag to buy tachrichim when they reach 70 (yekkes, for one). And do you think that the commercial casket makers don’t prepare in advance??
They are plywood boards connected with wooden pegs or dowels, with the center of the bottom open. Ask any frum funeral director or chevra kadisha.
Its not the cough that carries you off, its the coffin that carries you off in
I agree with Ivory. This is a question for the Chevra Kadisha.
@littleeema: Commercial casket makers, to the best of my knowledge, do not prepare in advance that this casket is made and set aside for Chaim for when he dies, and this casket is made and set aside for Chava when she does, etc.
“There are a number of woods that rot very quickly when placed in the ground”
That’s good. Jewish caskets should rot as quickly as possible. In Eretz Yisroel they actually bury without a casket altogether. For the same reason that the bottom is removed when there is a casket. (Perhaps that is why you mentioned that they rot.)
It’s a dead issue.
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