Archive Note
The textual core is Leviticus 19:28, which prohibits ketovet ka'aka and which rabbinic literature and the medieval codifiers, most decisively Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah, read as a near-categorical ban, though a minority strand in the tradition reads it more narrowly. In the twentieth century that religious register was transformed by the forced identification tattoos imposed on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which fused the prohibition with an embodied modern trauma and made any later Jewish tattoo legible against that history. A twenty-first-century reclamation movement runs alongside it, concentrated in Israel and the American diaspora, in which younger Jews, including descendants of survivors who replicate their grandparents' camp numbers, have used the tattoo for memory, identity, and defiance. The claim that a tattooed Jew cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery is rejected by Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform authorities alike and is one of the most-cited folk claims about the practice. Israeli tattoo culture has grown rapidly since the 1990s, particularly in the Florentin neighborhood of Tel Aviv, alongside the centuries-old Christian pilgrim tattoo trade at the Razzouk family studio in Jerusalem.