Row escalates between Hackney’s Orthodox Jews and coroner over burial of dead

Mourning: Over 2,000 people turned out to the funeral of Moshe Yitzchok Grunfeld. Photograph: Efrayim Goldstein

A senior coroner has been criticised as “insensitive” for ordering an autopsy of an Orthodox Jewish scholar against his family’s wishes.

Nineteen year-old Moshe Yitzchok Grunfeld from Stamford Hill, who had returned from his studies in New York for Passover, died last month when he drowned in Hampstead Heath ponds after going swimming with his friends on an unusually hot spring afternoon.

The Inner North London Coroner Mary Hassell ordered a full autopsy, despite his mother’s wish that a non-invasive post-mortem CT scan – a high-tech X-ray – should first take place to try and determine the cause of his death.

The autopsy ordered by Coroner Hassell was eventually blocked by the threat of an injunction by the Grunfeld family’s solicitor.

The subsequent CT scan, paid for by the family of the deceased, determined Mr Greenfuld had died from drowning.

This is the latest in a series of confrontations between Hackney’s Orthodox Jewish and Muslim communities and the senior coroner, dating back to her controversial decision to suspend the out-of-hours burial service when she came into office in 2013.

Both the religions of Islam and Judaism object to autopsy, seeing bodily intrusion as a violation of their beliefs about the sanctity of keeping the human body complete.

Community ‘traumatised’

The Jewish families have won permission to challenge the coroner’s conduct in a judicial review meaning a court battle will take place later this year. The case could lead to all families being given the right to demand a CT scan instead of a full autopsy.

Trevor Asserson of Asserson and Co., a leading litigation solicitor acting for the Jewish families, has so far brought two successful injunctions against Coroner Hassell.

Speaking from his office in Tel Aviv, Mr Asserson said: “This one coroner has proved very difficult in two respects. Firstly, she is insisting on autopsies unnecessarily, secondly she has suspended the out-of-hours service which effects the Jewish law to bury on time.

“There was this terribly sad event where this young man dies, and the coroner again insisted on an autopsy – a full autopsy when by doing a scan, there is a small chance that no invasive autopsy will be needed at all.”

“She appears to have gone out of her way to be insensitive to the community’s needs,” he added.

Rabbi Gratt, who has been liaising with coroner’s offices on behalf of the Jewish community for over 25 years, told the Citizen people are “traumatised” by the way deaths are being handled. He said: “The community is traumatised by her conduct, it is getting to the point where people are afraid to die. I know one couple who have emigrated permanently due to fear of being subjected to unnecessary delays at their funerals or – worse – an autopsy.”

Co-chair of the Muslim Jewish Forum Rabbi Herschel Gluck added: “There is a lack of understanding and a lack of sensitivity by the coroner to this issue that in Judaism, we have always buried our dead as quickly as possible, which is very central to Jewish religion, tradition and culture.”

Intimidation

Coroner Hassell declined to comment, but in a letter to Camden Council seen by the Hackney Citizen, she said that claims she does not allow CT scanning were “untrue”.

She wrote: “On occasions so numerous I could not count them, when a death is reported to me, I ask for additional enquiries to be made and discussions to take place, to try to avoid the need for any sort of post-mortem examination, whether or not I intend to proceed to inquest.

“I fully appreciate the distress such an examination is likely to bring for all families, not just those who are Jewish.”

The senior coroner also said her team had been “bullied and intimidated” by individuals within Stamford Hill’s Jewish community who repeatedly telephoned and visited her office. She wrote she had received emails accusing her of being anti-Semitic.

Rabbi Gratt rejected the accusations, saying: “The Jewish community has never been a violent society. We have tried to approach her quietly and reach a compromise but when she refused we challenged her through the courts.”