Military Exhumations & Making Markers Right | 4M #207

Welcome to the two-hundred-and-seventh edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #207, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!

Proper commemoration

During World War I and World War II, an estimated 900 American-Jewish servicemembers were buried in graves marked with Latin Crosses rather than the Jewish Star of David. A new bill hopes to correct those mistakes. Last week, the US House of Representatives passed a bill that will create and fund a 10-year project allowing the American Battle Monuments Commission to work with families to authenticate the ethnicities of the deceased and replace the erroneous military markers. Now it’s up to the Senate to do their part to make this incredibly important mission come to fruition. 

Speaking of veteran cemeteries …

On September 10, the Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated the country’s newest National Cemetery in Cedar City, Utah. Southern Utah National Cemetery will eventually accommodate 13,434 gravesites, with the first burials scheduled to take place later this month.

And just one more about veterans … and cemeteries …

Another new bill would expand the Department of Veterans Affairs’ authority to have veterans disinterred from national cemeteries without a literal act of Congress if they committed a violent crime in their lifetime and were buried before 2013. The Restoring the Sanctity of Public Entombments, Cemeteries, and Tributes (RESPECT) Act was introduced to the Senate last week, and complements the National Cemeteries Act that was passed in June 1973 and the much-updated 1997 law that prohibits the burial or memorialization of people who committed federal or state capital crimes and certain sex crimes.