The web-site GoLocalProvidence published an interesting article yesterday.  The essence of the article is that a Muslim leader in the area has accused a Rhode Island funeral home, Woodlawn Funeral Home, as being both anti-semetic and anti-Muslim, because in his opinion, his family was turned away for service.

The Muslim accuser, Farid Ansara, claims that after his mother-in-law passed away that he was told the family was not welcome.  He states that Woodlawn’s advertising states, ” Our goal is to serve every family with dignity, providing the best service to meet the personal needs of our families.”

Mike Tasca of the funeral home explains that the funeral home is not discriminatory, they are just not equipped, partly because of the expectations of these families, to handle them.  He explains that they have tried to do some Jewish funerals in the past and have actually been scolded by rabbis for some of their operations, such as not having a person of the Jewish faith on staff to wash the bodies.  Tasca notes that he told Ansara that he would be better off using a funeral service that is trained in the Muslim faith.

Funeral Director Daily take:  This is a pretty delicate situation.  We all know that we cannot discriminate on the grounds of race, creed, or color.  However, if someone from a different faith asks to use our facility, do they have the legal right to expect that all employees that work on the funeral must be the same faith as they are such as when Tasca was scolded by rabbis?  I would say that is a discrimination practice also by the consumer or their agents.  It is not financially possible for funeral homes to hire people from every religion and walk of life.

In Minnesota we have a large Hmong population.  The Hmong population is from southeast Asia and, while I have never done a service, I know that they can last for days.  They might tie up a visitation room for three days which caused problems for other families funeral homes needed to serve in a timely fashion.  Over time Hmong natives built and now operate their own funeral homes which solved the problem.

There is no doubt that the population of our country is becoming more diverse.  There are bound to be these type of problems popping up all over the country soon.  It will be a challenge for funeral service, but I’m guessing time and entrepreneurship will over come the situation in the not so distant future.  I can remember back to when almost every small town in America had a Catholic funeral home and a Protestant funeral home — today, in most communities they are pretty well blended.  While we wait for this to happen there will continue to be situations such as happened in Rhode Island.  Do you have a plan for handling a client family that does not fit your usual case mix?[wpforms id=”436″ title=”true” description=”true”]