Grigorescu, Felicia: Forme de artă în cimitire evreieşti din nord-vestul Romaniei (Satu Mare, 2013)
Glosar de termeni
This classification can seem quite detailed at first sight, but the subgroups can be taken even further according to other characteristics, thanks to the diversity of the elements' composition and the ingenuity of the craftsmen who created them, almost each tomb stone having its particular elements. Through a few essential shapes, a boundless diversity is created. There are although between the typologies mentioned in the classification, frequent shapes which we find in all the Jewish cemeteries in the studied area, around which the other shapes will be mixed in time and space. These are found in extended areas in central and east Europe migrating with the Jewish communities on the tracks dictated by history. Because in most Jewish cemeteries, the graves were positioned in rows, in the order of their date of death, we can notice a certain group of typologies belonging to a family of shapes, which were favoured at a certain time. The diversity of the Jewish tomb stones has always attracted the researchers' attention, proposing categories of classification predominantly according to the characteristic shape, despite other possible criteria (age, ornaments, material, etc. The simplest classifications reduce the shapes of the tomb stones to three:- rectangular with the upper part triangular with the upper part in a circular arch Schöner Alfréd identifies according to the image preserved in the book of Hevra Kadişa from Nagykanizsa (end of the XVIII century) five types of tomb stones76: the shape of the tabernacle the shape with pediment the shape of the Decalogue the shape with a straight line ending- the shape of the tent When the analysis is done only in one cemetery, it usually reduces to identifying the most frequent shapes (Pic. 1). The work of professor Silviu Sanie, who elaborated a very complex classification of the cemetery from the hill, in Şiret (SV) refers to only one cemetery and identifies all the forms present in the site. A classification of eight groups of shapes was presented in a work of Horváth Zoltán, taken from the recommendation of the architects Yael Alef and Raanan Kislev in 1993, shapes which can be identified in the studied area as well (Pic. 2). The classification that we put forth includes all the encountered shapes of tomb stones, at least in terms of characteristics of classification, frequency: rare or frequent (characteristic identified with the symbols I and II). The frequent ones (I) are grouped around some shapes which usually refer expressively to the Jewish identity. Within the characteristic I we identify the canons of the shapes of the Jewish tomb stones, canons which were stipulated by the biblical texts: the shape of the Temple from Jerusalem and the pole as a sign of Jacob on Rachel's grave. At the group "rare" (II), there are uncommon shapes, sometimes asymmetric or even strange, encountered in the areas of the graves from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th lh Schöner A., A pokol..., p. 59 113
