Grigorescu, Felicia: Forme de artă în cimitire evreieşti din nord-vestul Romaniei (Satu Mare, 2013)
Glosar de termeni
lighting of the candles at holidays or weekly during the Sabbath and the other common activities: the good deeds, the food and even the clothes. The blessing would consist of a transfer of forces in order to sanctify through the Word . The Cohen is a priest of first order, who is also a descendant of Levi’s Tribe. The blessing is spoken with risen hands. The symbol described above is specific for the cemeterial art, and appears on the tombstones of the Cohens. From the size and the value of the stone, the representation can be a modest incision or a representation in low relief, very naturalistic, in which details are faithfully represented, such as the nails or the wrinkles of the phalanges’ knuckles. Ritual vessels. These symbols are also among the Judaic identitary elements, being the ones that usually refer to the function that the deceased performed in the synagogue, the ritual vessels that he used being represented. From these, the carafes are highlighted as number and shape, either alone or laid in a water basin (image 8), both vessels being necessary for the entrance in the prayer room. Also, cruets (Pic.*44) and vessels for burnings were identified. The crown. Chevalier’s and Gheerbrant’s dictionary of symbols describes the crown - Hebrew, keter - as representing not only the values of the head - the acme of the human body -, but also the values above the head, marking the transcendental nature of completion. Its circular shape, according to the authors mentioned above, indicates the perfection and the participation to the celestial nature, whose symbol is the sky. This is an indicator of the separation between the terrestrial and the celestial, between the human and the divine. It is at the same time a symbol of the promise of an everlasting life . The crown is present on the fronton of the tombstone (Pic. 65). Its representation is usually naturalistic, with focus on its decorative elements. 2. Pseudo-architectonic decorative elements The historiography of the Judaic art has registered the fact that the ensemble of the architectonic elements used in the Judaic architecture are elements that make exact reference to the architecture of the origins of the Jewish people, or of those territories they passed through, and where for a certain period of time they had known their bloom117 * 119. We find these elements in the synagogal architecture, as well as in the cemeterial pseudo-architecture. The colonnette. The most frequent architectonic elements of the Judaic art are the colonnettes, the frontons, the cornices and the pillars, components of the architecture according to the Biblical descriptions. The colonnettes can appear single, pairwise, or several at a time, in successive retreats, with the role of sustaining simple or double arches, broken, in trefle , braced, or of composed shape (Pic. 66). The shape of the cone can be simple, smooth, with a column head or juxtaposed column heads, Doric, free or leant on a wall, channeled, in rope moulding, with a wider or edgier spiral, in 117 Ibidem, voi. I, p. 196 Ibidem, voi. I, p. 371 119 S. L. Lerner, Narrating ..., p. 11. The Jews living both in Italy and Spain, in their post-emancipation effervescence, often get close to the Spanish Moresque, which reminds them that they had lived their Golden Century there, and less to the Italian Renaissance architecture, which represented for them the connection to the habitat in the ghetto. 131
