Obj. ID: 31513
Jewish Funerary Art Bellu Sephardi Jewish Cemetery in Bucharest, Romania
The Sephardi Cemetery of Bucharest is situated near the main municipal necropolis, known as Bellu, after Baron Barbu Bellu, who donated the land in 1858. The Christian Bellu cemetery includes Orthodox, Catholic, military, and Heroes sections, and the Jewish cemetery across the road supplements these. The cemetery was created in 1865, and the gate structure housing the cleansing room and the hall for funeral services was erected at the same time.[1] The gate was built in the Neo-Moorish style fashionable at this period among Jewish communities of Europe. The fact that the cemetery belonged to the Sephardi community added additional sense to the usage of that style which represents the Orient.
The central part of the Bellu Sephardi cemetery occupies a monument to the Jews killed as Romanian soldiers during World War I.
Among other tombstones in the cemetery, there are several family mausolea built in modernist styles in the early twentieth century.
After the Holocaust, the Sephardi community of Bucharest disappeared and now the cemetery serves all Bucharest Jews who can afford purchasing a plot. Thus the majority of the graves are from the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Almost all of them are low concrete stelae with marble plaques, exactly as the graves in the third cemetery of Bucharest, the Giurgiului Road Cemetery
[1] Stoica, Atlas-ghid, 263.
sub-set tree:
| Șoseaua Olteniței 2/ Calea Serban Voda 249/ Șoseaua Giurgiului 2
Gruber, Samuel D. (ed.). Historic Jewish Sites in Romania (Washington: United States Commission for Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, 2010)., https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=rel (accessed December 1, 2021)