GrödelsSichtweisen....

Eastern European Jewish tombstones

From the late 17th century on the art of Jewish tombstones lived a great revival. This period saw the establishment of an Eastern European school of tombstone carving which assimilated the motifs of high Baroque art into a “folk Baroque”, a widespread popular art. This virtually unprecedented flaring of folk art was most certainly connected with the incursion of Hasidism which propagated the beauty and love of life, and rediscovered the relationship between man and nature.

The stones of this period were more and more often filled with ornamental and symbolic images; at the same time, the pediment itself grew larger. An extreme example of this tendency can be seen in the gravestones of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century southeastern Poland, Ukraine, and Moldavia, where the pediment, richly ornamented and filled with symbolic motifs, constituted almost half of the tombstone, and the main principle of its composition seems to have been “horror vacui".

Often it is impossible to determine whether a certain element of the rich decoration – an animal as an eagle, deer, lion or dove, or a crown, a bookcase, a fruit or a flower – is a symbol or just an ornament. It is perhaps more correct to speak about an imagery or a pictorial language which recalled a series of associations in the Jews well-versed in holy books and the Jews knowing folktales and legends.