The Freedom Tower

Blogging at GetReligion.org, Tmatt says he knows why family members of 9/11 victims continue to seek proper burials for their fallen loved ones.

Years ago, the Religious News Service wrote about Sally Regenhard and the need to give her probationary fire fighter son, Christian, this proper burial after the memorial Mass on Oct. 26, 2001. When it was over, Sally could not proceed to a cemetery because there was no body. Christian’s remains were never found.
Now, more than six years later, Regenhard is part of a civil lawsuit against New York City by the group World Trade Center Families for Proper Burial, which was founded in 2003 to retrieve the remains of family members in hopes of providing a proper burial.
The suit, filed by veteran civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, turns in part on a novel legal claim: that the families’ inability to bury their loved ones according to the tenets of their faith violates their First Amendment right of free religious exercise. The families want a portion of the 1 million tons of World Trade Center debris that was sent to Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island to be resifted and — even if no human remains are identified — transferred to a location that can serve as a mass grave.
Now, for this story to work you need to know that there is more to it than people wanting to properly bury the remains of their loved ones. You need to know that they need to, for specific reasons of religious law or tradition.
You need that information in the story. But how are you supposed to do that, when the tragedy involved so many people from such radically different faith traditions? And, of course, an Orthodox Jewish tradition may or may not affect the beliefs of Jews in Conservative or Reform congregations. Beliefs are now — as I hinted at earlier — split among Catholics