Obj. ID: 40063
Jewish Funerary Art  Tenth Alley Jewish Sector in the Arskoe Cemetery in Kazan, Russia

Arskoe Cemetery (first mentioned in 1766) is Kazan’s central cemetery; it has three Jewish sectors and hundreds of Jewish tombstones. The Fourth Alley Sector has the oldest graves, starting from the 1890s. A mausoleum without an epitaph is said to mark the grave of one of Kazan rabbis; judging from its architectural style, it was erected in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Other pre-revolutionary tombstones are quite typical for the communities outside the Pale of Settlement and bear the traditional Hebrew and Russian epitaphs. Such combination of two languages continued in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1940s, Jewish graves appeared also at the Tenth Alley Sector and in the so-called Polish Sector, which is close to the entrance to the cemetery and seemingly was considered more prestigious. While the majority of gravestones were now inscribed in Russian only, Hebrew epitaphs were quite common until the 940s. Some tombstones from the 1950s and 1960s bear Hebrew epitaphs and/or Stars of David. There is also a distinctive feature in Russian epitaphs in Kazan: many of them contain a phrase “This is the last present” to the deceased. The latest attempt in the Soviet period to write in Hebrew was found on a gravestone of Yulii son of Boris and Sura-Haya daughter of Aaron Shleifman, who died in 1969 and 1976 . The Hebrew part of the epitaph contains only their names, spelled according to the Yiddish pronunciation: “Yidl-Leib BorekhAizik’s [sic!], Sure-Khaye Arn’s.”