Following an agreement reached last summer, the Italian government allocated €6.5 million for work to be carried out – under Halachic supervision – at the site of a centuries’-old Jewish cemetery in Mantova so that a major urban regeneration project,”Mantova Hub,” can be completed. As of June, however, work at the cemetery remained suspended due to bureaucratic holdups in allocating the funds.
DavidPalterer, a consultant for the Mantova Hub project on behalf of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), told JHE he expected work to begin once the municipality formally transfers the funds to the architectural firm chosen to carry out the work at the cemetery site.
The €18 million “Mantova Hub” project is to revitalize a long-neglected complex of buildings for educational, cultural and social use. Progress on the project ran into problems because part of the complex includes the site of the cemetery.
Known as San Niccolò, the cemetery was founded in the mid-15th century and closed in 1786. It had already been sold to local authorities by the Jewish community nearly 170 years ago and had long been partially built over by some of the buildings slated for renewal as part of the Hub.
Haredi rabbis and others from outside Italy had attempted to block any work at the cemetery site, saying the cemetery had been sold under duress. Archival evidence shows that noted rabbis were buried there.
See a video from 2019 of Jews from Jerusalem praying at the cemetery wall:
An agreement was reached in July 2020, however, between the city and Italian Jewish authorities, with input from representatives of the Haredi Jewish cemetery protection organization Asra Kadisha, whereby work on the Hub will go forward at the cemetery site, in accordance with Halacha. Asra Kadisha had earlier been one of the groups calling for the work to be halted.
The agreement resulted in the new grant, which was made official at the beginning of this year.
“From a very complex problem a new opportunity has arisen, and now with these funds also this part of the project [at the Jewish cemetery] may restart again”, Mantova’s mayor told the Italian Jewish news site Moked.it at the time.
The agreement was based on a set of guidelines and case studies drawn up by Palterer and Ph.D. fellow Luca Cardani, both from the Faculty of Architecture of the Mantova campus of Milano Polytechnic.
Under the agreement, Palterer told JHE, the area of the former cemetery cannot be excavated, and a Rabbi should always be present whenever any type of work is to be performed on the site.
The history of the cemetery site is complex.
The Jewish community was forced to sell the site to the authorities in 1852 when Mantova was under Austrian rule; ownership was later transferred to the Italian state. The city of Mantova currently owns the site.
Over the centuries, all the cemetery’s matzevot were either destroyed or removed, and both the Austrian and Italian authorities constructed on much of the site.
During WWII, the Nazis used the area, on the outskirts of the city, as a concentration camp for Italian soldiers, and after the war it served as a refugee and DP camp. The area returned under Italian military supervision, during which five barracks were constructed on part of the cemetery site. These barracks cannot be demolished, as they are listed as a national monument.
From the 2000s, the complex on and around the cemetery site, which includes a former brick factory, became increasingly derelict. The Mantova Hub redevelopment is being carried out with an €18 million grant received by the city in 2016 under a state-funded program for the regeneration of suburbs.
In 2018, during cleaning work at the cemetery site — paid for by the municipality and carried out under Rabbinical supervision — workers discovered the foundations of the original cemetery walls and of the ceremonial hall, which corresponded to those indicated on Austrian maps.
Over the years around 20 matzevot and fragments from the destroyed cemetery have been found, both in the “New” Jewish cemetery, still in used by the local Jewish community, and elsewhere.
Some had been used for construction purposes.
The first matzevah was discovered already in the 1920s, in a stone warehouse, by Emanuele Colorni’s father. This matzevah, of the noted Amsterdam-born Rabbi Moses Zacuto (1625-1697), is now stored in the city’s Diocesan museum, together with the tombstone of Rabbi Yedidiah Norsa (1560-1616).
Photographs of these stones and translations of their epitaphs were published in 2008 in the book Il Giardino degli Ebrei – Cimiteri ebraici del Mantovano.
Read about the contested plans for the project, and the protests
Read the text of Il Giardino degli Ebrei online on academia.edu
Watch a 2017 video about the Mantova Hub project showing the abandoned area
1 comment on “Italy: An agreement last year enables “Mantova Hub” urban renewal work to proceed under Halachic supervision at the site of Mantova’s old Jewish cemetery, but work is stalled because of hold-ups in allocating new funds”
Porque en vez de gastar en restaurar cementerios donde nos arrasaron no dan viviendas a los jóvenes judíos en Israel. Es hacia el futuro y no hurgar en el dolor de lo que ya no es.