Tóth Vilmos: Funeral Art - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2006)

The Jewish Cemeteries at the Turn of the 20th Century

Steiner family. Similar to the latter is the monument made in 1912, the communal grave where the remains were transferred from the old Jewish cemeteries in Váci út and Lehel utca and so is the tombstone commemorating the heroes fallen in the 1848-49 War of Liberty. Contemporaneous with these and similar in the wealth of folkloric ornamentation but different in the formal type they represent are the Kudelka and the Lukács sepulchres. Raised in 1910, the tombstone of Mrs. Miksa Szabolcsi recalls with its shape the tentlike ohel, one of the traditional Jewish sepulchres.

Besides Lajta, there were others, too, representing contemporary architectural tendencies in the Jewish funereal art of the period at a high level of excellence. Relatively few works of these artists were set up in the Salgótarjáni utca Cemetery, as most of the suitably prestigious areas, such as the row of mural vaults, had already been occupied by Eclectic mausoleums and sepulchres. An important work from this period is the Blau vault, designed by Sámuel Révész and József Kollár and the Mahler Mausoleum, made by Béla Barát and Ede Novák. Completed in 1902, the sepulchral monument of Baron Béla Madarassy-Beck was designed by Albert Kálmán Körössy as well as the other Madarassy-Beck tomb next to it. Their asymmetric pattern and unique shape lend a distinctive appearance to Emil Vidor's two funeral monuments: the tombs of Mór Davidssohn from 1906 and that of Vilmos Freund from 1910. A Neo-Classicist sepulchre calling attention to itself with its dimensions above all is the funeral vault of Baron Manfréd Weiss, by Géza Aladár Kármán and Gyula Ullmann. Near the ceremonial hall stands the Neuschloss Monument, a monolithic sepulchre designed by Jenő Körmendi-Frim forming an internal gate to the cemetery with the similarly-shaped Mauthner tomb. The designer of the latter is likely to have been Körmendi-Frim also, but it is only the Neuschloss tomb that bears a signature. Another important tomb is the one designed by Ferenc Faragó for the remains of Vilmos Grauer and the tomb of Aladár Kaszab by Miklós Kaszab. Several finely-carved tombstones were produced by stonemason Arnold Kohn, including ones made to plans by Lajta, but there are tombs made by the Gerenday and the Seenger companies, too.

Many more mausoleums and tombs were built in the styles of the turn of the century in Kozma utca, where Eclecticist sepulchres are in minority. Of the architects mentioned above, Barát and Novák drew the plans of the Wellisch Mausoleum, Kármán and Ullmann the Goldberger Mausoleums, while Zsigmond Vidor’s tomb was designed by Emil Vidor. The mausoleums of the Redlich and the Ohrenstein families or the one where József Lukács lies buried are the works of

40