Grigorescu, Felicia: Forme de artă în cimitire evreieşti din nord-vestul Romaniei (Satu Mare, 2013)
Glosar de termeni
shapes that are almost unrepeatable in the restless heterogeneity of the Judaic eclecticism. The same variety of shapes is presented by the Judaic architecture when the colonnette is replaced by the pillar, yet this element does not appear with the same frequency. The colonnettes are customary in the area of the shrine and in the temple-type gravestone, as references to the architecture of the first Temple - at the Jachin and Boaz pillars. The fronton. The fronton, through the place of maximum visibility that it occupies and through the dimensions it is built in, plays a very important role in defining the form of the architecture that it composes (Pic. 12). The great diversity of form of this architectural element determines the variety of shapes it takes. In the analysis of the tombstone’s shape, due to its smaller dimensions, the role of the fronton’s form is decisive for the built shape, thus becoming a classifying feature. The role of the frontons in the Judaic architecture is augmented by the fact that they are the ostentatious, strongly narrative carriers of the Judaic identitary symbols. The cornice. Although it is of almost insignificant dimensions in the construction’s economy, this architectural element contributes to emphasizing other elements’ role in the composition of the construction, which it puts forward. The shapes in which this element has been used in the Judaic architecture have enhanced its formative connotations immensely. In the synagogal architecture, we meet it in the marking of the tangent of the vertical component, or of the division of their section. At the gravestone, its role increases due to its reduced dimensions, the cornices thus gaining in the general proportion, especially when they are developed or doubled, in which case, from their function in determining the shape, they turn into a self-contained component of the quasi-construction (Pic. 12). The cornice is an element of great mobility of the form: it can be simple, accentuated, double, in successive accession or decrease, or, when the fronton’s shape requires it, it can be interrupted in the centre, right or following the curved shapes of the other elements of architecture which it determines. These elements of architecture are not shapes invented by the Jews; they are only selected by them from the known historical architectonic medium, necessary for the biblically-prescribed construction. The Jachin and Boaz Pillars. The symbolic reference to this architectural element - to the two pillars called Jachin and Boaz, placed at the entrance1211 by Hiram, the Phoenician constructor of the Temple of Solomon mentioned in the Bible - is very frequent (Pic. 67). We could associate to this architectonic symbol both the entrances in the synagogues, flanked by pillars or towers, and the cemeterial pseudo-architecture, the most frequent shape in the studied area. Their present frequency is visibly emphasized since the 19th century, when the architecture, freed from constraints and fears, seeks its ways of expression in its own matrix of origins: ...And he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple: and he set up the right pillar, and called the name thereof Jachin: and he set up the left pillar, and he called the name thereof Boaz. And upon the top of the pillars [was] lily work: so was the work of the pillars finished... In the same Biblical passages, we figure that Hiram made the pillars from copper. Gerald N. Shapiro makes a complex 120 1201. Müller, A Rumbach Sebestyén utcai zsinagóga, Otto Wagner fiatalkori főműve Budapesten, Locker Verlag Wien, MFA Judaisztikai Kutatócsoport, Budapest 1993, p.14, (From now on: Rumbach...); Hana Taragan, The „Gate of Heaven” synagogue in Cairo, în Journal of Jewish Identitie, 2009, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal of jewish identities/v002/2.ltaragan.pdf, p.36, (From now on: Cairo...) 132
