Fredrika Shavit v. Rishon Lezion Jewish Burial Society

of transaction, whether in the realm of private or public law, the
relevant documents always bear the standard date, not to mention
statutes and ordinances. As has been noted, even the official
documents of the rabbinate do not lack a space for the standard
date. Is this not a case of discrimination? It is the arbitrary
negation of a person’s right to use the standard calendar to record
his or her dates of birth and death, though all the events of his or
her life were marked by this calendar!
Gideon [1] at 23.
Of course, in that case, the Jewish burial society relied on the
ruling of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who wrote that:
It is absolutely forbidden to erect a gravestone with a non-
Hebrew date because there is a Biblical prohibition that says:
“Make no mention of the name of other gods”, and the Gregorian
calendar recalls the number of years since the Christian birth.
Id.at 19.
To this Justice Etzioni responded that “it is difficult … to treat this
opinion as the final word on the matter” for the following reason:
As has been proven, standard dates appear in many cemeteries
which are managed by Jewish burial societies. Suffice to mention
the cemetery on Trumpeldor Street in Tel Aviv and the Haifa and
Tzfat cemeteries. Additionally, the leaders of the Torah world
and the nation who are buried in the Diaspora were buried in
cemeteries where it was acceptable practice to erect gravestones
carved with standard birth and death dates. If this is not enough,
the visitor to the Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, where the
great soldiers and luminaries of Israel are interred, will see with
his or her own eyes that birth and death dates are carved
according to the standard calendar. Among them: the graves of
the family of the visionary of the state, Theodor Herzl, and the
graves of the Zionist leaders Wolfson, Sokolow and others.