high premium the Torah places on the honor of the dead. Many burial societies hold one or two annual fast days and organise regular study sessions to remain up-to-date with the relevant articles of Jewish law. In addition, most burial societies also support families during the shiv'ah (traditional week of mourning) by arranging prayer services, meals and other facilities. While burial societies were, in Europe, generally a community function, in the United States it has become far more common for societies to be organized by neighborhood synagogues. In the late 19th and early 20th century, chevra kadisha societies were formed as landsmanshaft fraternal societies in the United States. Some landsmanshaftn were burial societies while others were "independent" groups split off from the chevras. There were 20,000 such landsmanshaftn in the U.S. at one time. Recordkeeping The chevra kadisha of communities in pre-World War II Europe maintained Pinkas Klali D’Chevra Kadisha (translation: general notebook of the Chevra Kadisha); some were handwritten in Yiddish, others in Hebrew. Etymology In Hebrew the word can be written חבורה קדושה ("sacred society") while in Aramaic: חבורתא קדישתא. Modern Hebrew "chevra" (chiefly Ashkenazic) is of unclear etymology. The Aramaic phrase is first attested in Yekum Purkan, in a 13th-century copy of Machzor Vitry, but it was rarely used again in print until it gained its modern sense of "burial society" in the nineteenth century. The Hebrew phrase predated it in modern popularity by some decades. Probably the Modern Hebrew phrase is a phonetic transliteration of the Ashkenazic pronunciation of Heb. חבורה קדושה chevra qadisha which has been misinterpreted as an Aramaic phrase and therefore spelled with a yodh and aleph. This auspicious title exists because performing a favor for someone who is dead is considered the ultimate act of kindness – as a dead person can never repay the kindness, making it devoid of ulterior motives. Its work is therefore referred to as a chesed shel emet (, "a good deed of truth"), paraphrased from (where Jacob asks his son Joseph, "do me a 'true' favor" and Joseph promises his father to bury him in the burial place of his ancestors). See also Asra Kadisha Chesed Shel Emes Chevra Kaddisha Cemetery, Sacramento Hebrew Free Burial Association Landsmanshaft Misaskim ZAKA References Further reading Chesed Shel Emet: The Truest Act of Kindness, Rabbi Stuart Kelman, October, 2000, EKS Publishing Co. , . A Plain Pine Box: A Return