Tóth Vilmos: Funeral Art - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2006)
The Jewish Cemeteries at the Turn of the 20th Century
Ignác Alpár, the Újhelyi Mausoleum was designed by the great builder of synagogues Lipót Baumhorn, and the mausoleum of Antal Grosz was built to plans by Zoltán Bálint and Lajos Jámbor. István Sárkány designed the sepulchres of the Halmos family as well as those of László Fayer and Zsigmond Fayer, all three around 1907. Also characteristic works were made by Móric Pogány, Emil Tory, Alfréd Wellisch, Henrik Böhm, and Gyula Fodor. Here mention should be made of two funeral monuments from the Jewish Cemetery in Farkasrét, which holds relatively few sepulchres of any great architectural value: László Vágó’s tomb designed by Emil Vidor and Károly Baracs's by Dezső Jakab and Aladár Sós. Numerous sculptural works can be found in the Israelite cemeteries of Budapest. Although secularisation was a major tendency in both the Christian and the Jewish funeral practices of the period, the Salgótarjáni utca Cemetery preserves the monuments of archaic customs of interment, which are complemented and transformed by architectural design. The majority of figurái works were set up here after the turn of the century, such as the funeral monument of Mrs. Augenfeld née Ilona Gaiduschek by Elza Kövesházi Kalmár or of József Kiss by Aladár Gárdos. Thus sculptures can be found here, too, even though their presence is far from characteristic, and the representation of human figures is entirely absent. In Kozma utca, however, sculpture made its first appearances right from the start, both in the shape of simpler, ornamental motifs and that of animal and anthropomorphic representations - or, as in the case of Ede Telcs’s abovemen- tioned work, as carved still-lives. The original ban on anthropomorphic likenesses is suggested by the fact that the human forms that do appear turn away or hide their faces. A fine example of that is Izsák Perlmutter’s tomb by István Szent- györgyi. This rule is broken by very few exceptions indeed, and it is even les frequent, although not impossible, to see sculptural portraits. Thus it was first the formal restrictions that were relaxed in the Neologue cemeteries, at a time when the injunction on idolatry inherited from archaic times and amplified in the Diaspora was still a potent force (as exemplified by the Salgótarjáni utca Cemetery), after which bans of a more substantial nature were also at least partially ignored. Further sepulchres of sculptural importance in the Kozma utca Cemetery include the tombs of Izidor Barna by Kornél Sámuel, of Sándor Bródy by Erzsébet Forgács Hann, and the Heroes' Monument of World War I victims designed by Lajos Mészáros. Mention is also to be made of Ede Kisteleki's tomb by János Istók, which features a pelican feeding its offspring with her own blood, a motif associated with Christian symbolism. (An almost 41
