Obj. ID: 40067
Jewish Funerary Art Jewish Cemetery in Samara, Russia
The old Jewish cemetery in Samara has been demolished. The current cemetery, established in 1908, is situated next to the Tatar one, at Novouritskaia St. Its oldest parts were demolished in 1960 so that only a dozen pre-revolutionary tombstones are preserved. Among thousands of graves, there are the tombstones of the Rabbis Moshe Yehezkel (d. 1926), Yehuda Leib Palterovich (d. 1934) and Menahem Mendel Openstein (d. 1975). The latter, unusually combines a traditional inscription with a photograph of the deceased. Hebrew epitaphs disappeared from the tombstones already in the 1920s, but the Stars of David remained a common feature until the 1940s and sporadically appeared even in the early 1980s. A tombstone of 1995 presents another way of expression of Jewish identity: Russian letters in the epitaph are stylized as the Hebrew ones.
sub-set tree:
Levin, Vladimir and Anna Berezin, Jewish Material Culture along the Volga
Preliminary. Expedition Report (The Center for Jewish Art, 2021), https://cja.huji.ac.il/home/pics/projects/CJA_Report_on_the_Volga_expedition_2021.pdf (accessed June 6, 2023)