Obj. ID: 39317
Jewish Funerary Art Jewish cemetery in Ulyanovsk, Russia
The oldest found tombstones date back to 1871 and 1874. They are brick structures above the graves with sandstone stelae bearing Hebrew epitaphs
From the 1890s, Russian inscriptions were placed along the Hebrew ones. This fashion became a rule in the 1920s, but by the 1950s it faded.
A Star of David was placed on a tombstone at the latest in 1956.
A notable exception is the grave of Colonel Iosif Kaplun, which is situated apart from the other graves. Kaplun was an officer in the Red Army and participated in WWII. For the successful crossing of the Dnieper by his brigade in 1943, Kaplun was decorated with the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (second class). Ironically, this order, created to celebrate the liberation of Ukraine, was named after the notorious leader of the 1648 Cossack rebellion, which whipped out entire Jewish communities. Colonel Kaplun died in 1971; the tombstone has his photograph in military uniform with all the decorations and an epitaph in Russian and Hebrew. Judging from the style of the Hebrew letters and spelling mistakes, this epitaph was made in the 1970s or 1980s. It reads “Kaplun, reb Yosef bar Noah, deceased on the first day of Kislev 5732.
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)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Еврейские_кладбища_в_Ульяновске
https://olgasingularia.livejournal.com/1536.html