Grigorescu, Felicia: Forme de artă în cimitire evreieşti din nord-vestul Romaniei (Satu Mare, 2013)

Glosar de termeni

another, but also their way they were set. Ashkenazi placed tomb stones at the head of the deceased in a vertical position, while Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi from Israel placed them in a horizontal position across grave. In north-west Romania there are mostly vertical rocks, but there are also horizontal monuments or even mausoleums and sarcophagi, such as those of cemeteries in Bihor county. The exceptions are those which give charm to these cemeteries, the variety being one side of dualism specific to Jewish world: unique (in the case of tomb stones - for example) / perfectly identical copy (in the case of holy writings).

The quality of stone used in the construction of funeral monuments has varied depending on the rock resources in the area but also on the financial situation of the deceased. The finest material used was black marble74, as well as of other colors, spectacular during processing and durable in time. Another used material of good quality and highly durable, was granite. However, the most common tomb stones are made of sandstone, in variable shades, from gray to pale yellow and pink. Their durability is high, but through the centuries, age managed to cram or exfoliate them; the epitaphs, the ornaments and even the original shape of many of them being impossible to be read. The first to degrade were stones with a higher content of calcium in their composition (tuff and volcanic foams, chalkstones, sandstones). When the concrete started to be increasingly used in the construction sector, the Jews used it to make funeral monuments; this generated the use of moulds.

The degree of conservation of funeral monuments differs according to their age and the stone quality. Here are situations, characteristic to all Jewish cemeteries in the area:- graves with missing tomb stones, which were either entirely crushed by weather or sank in the ground, this is a situation in the oldest sectors of the cemeteries, inferring their existence from the rise in height of the stones. It could be possible to be a hidden cemetery, where monuments have sunk, until their disappearance from the surface, and conservation under the ground;- broken stones with piled pieces, after biblical instruction, on their original locations in the row of graves (Pic. 60);- exfoliated, engulfed in the ground, the surface part keeps neither original form of monument nor the epitaph and the ornament;- with the base in its original position, but the monument fallen off the base and supported by it, in this case since it would be difficult to specify if the base and the monument are original pairs, because very frequent the base stone differs from that of the monument;- preserved in their original positions, but on their surfaces the background or the epitaph cannot be identified, however these elements are important, because they are testifier of the stone shape evolution in time (Pic. 60);- incomplete, the monuments that are in their original position but miss smaller or larger pieces. Their shape can be restored and sometimes the background and the epitaph are legible on the remaining section;

74 Starting with the 17th century of Jews were concern of the use of fine materials for funeral monuments, famous stones imported from The Netherlands, kept alive by the painter Jacob von Ruizdael in his known work "Jewish Cemetery" dated around 1655 - 1660. It is known that the painter made his drawings in the Jewish cemetery from Ouderkerk, near Amsterdam.

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