(JHE) — A three-year project to renovate and partially reconstruct the tahara house, or ceremonial hall, of the monumental Jewish cemetery in Rijeka has been completed. The building will be used as a cultural space to host events and initiatives related to the city’s Jewish history and heritage.
The €60,000 project included work on the building’s roof, stairs, façade, and internal decorations, as well as on its Hebrew inscriptions of the Kaddish and other prayers and blessings; and a new electrical system was installed, the Jewish community said. The restoration was co-financed by the city’s municipality and the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County and was supervised by the local heritage authority.
The hall was designed by Francesco Plaček and inaugurated in 1904 at the entrance to the Jewish section of the vast Kozala municipal cemetery.
The simple white building has a main rectangular section with a lower, enclosed porch-like extension. It is divided into two main rooms: a larger one, dedicated to visitors, and a smaller one, where the deceased are prepared for burial. Above the entrance is a Hebrew inscription taken from psalm 73 which states: “Whom have I in Heaven but you? And there is nothing on Earth that I desire besides you?”
Laid out in the late 19th century, the Jewish section of Kozala is divided into two sections: the old part, which contains gravestones and monumental tombs from the first decades after the cemetery opened, as well as matzevot brought from an earlier Jewish cemetery; and the new part, still in use by the city’s small Jewish community, which numbers around 150 members from Rijeka and the surrounding region.
You can find documentation and pictures of more than 550 graves on a web site about the cemetery, which also includes a map and searchable database.
Rijeka – known as Fiume in Italian – is a seaport in the northern Adriatic; thanks to its strategic location, it was historically contested by Italy, Austro-Hungary, and others and over the centuries came under shifting rule. Listed today as a historical monument, the Jewish cemetery bears witness to the rich, multicultural Jewish past of the city, thanks part to its status as a free economic zone, granted by the Austrian rulers in 1719.
This cemetery served as the final resting place of all the Jews of Rijeka and nearby Sušak, including Orthodox and Neolog Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, without distinction. The inscriptions on the tombstones are written in several languages, including Italian, Hungarian, German and Croatian, and some of the majestic tombs were designed by the city’s best-known architects at the turn of the century.
Last autumn, in the context of the events marking Rijeka as European Capital of Culture in 2020, the Jewish community organized an exhibition called “Tahara” dedicated to the restoration of the ceremonial hall. It took place first in the gallery of the Orthodox synagogue, and later in a municipal gallery.
The Orthodox synagogue, built in 1932 and designed in art deco style by Győző Angyal and Pietro Fabbro, is the only surviving synagogue in the city.
Its Neolog synagogue, inaugurated in 1903, was a monumental domed structure designed by the Hungarian architect Lipót Baumhorn, the most prolific synagogue architect in pre-WWII Europe, and built at the time the community was at its peak, with some 2,500 members. The synagogue was torched and then destroyed by the Nazis after the occupation of the city in 1944. To remember the synagogue, in October 2019, in the context of Rijeka European Capital of Culture 2020, the Croatian artist Damir Stojnić painted the design of the footprint of the synagogue on the pavement where it had stood.
Web site of the Rijeka Jewish cemetery
Facebook page of the Rijeka Jewish community
Tahara exhibit catalogue (PDF)
PDF Brochure about the Rijeka Tahara House (Croatian/English/Italian)