The U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation has awarded $200,000 toward the restoration of the funeral hall (beit kaddishim) within the sprawling Chișinău Jewish Cemetery on Milano Street.
The project, announced Tuesday, is a partnership between the U.S. and Moldovan governments, in consultation with Moldova’s Jewish community, and will include a site survey, historical research, and ultimately restoration of the building. Constructed around 1900, the building is facing collapse following eight decades of neglect, with its roof gone and its walls still bearing traces of shelling during World War II.
“More intact are its dome, some interior decoration and — most important — its symbolism in a city where Jews comprised nearly half of the population in the early 1900s and prior the Holocaust,” Moldova’s state Jewish History Museum said in a statement announcing the grant.
A project team led by the museum’s director Dr. Irina Șihova will “conserve and protect the chapel, renewing it but retaining historically valuable evidence of the destruction that occurred during the Holocaust and under Soviet rule,” the statement said.
“This chapel is one of the jewels of Moldova’s rich Jewish heritage but it is in such bad condition that we worried it might collapse altogether,” Șihova said in the statement. “We are grateful to receive this grant, which will bring new life to the structure and help us tell the story of Moldova’s rich Jewish heritage.”
The 11-hectare cemetery contains the graves of victims of Chisinau’s bloody 1903 pogrom, a memorial to Holocaust mass execution victims, a genizah where Torah scrolls are buried, graves of eminent rabbis. But it is mainly the resting place for members of a Jewish community that once thrived and then nearly vanished, reviving only recently in much smaller numbers.
“The building of the cemetery chapel, or Beit Kadishim, on the Milano St. Jewish cemetery in Chișinău is a very important monument of Jewish architecture,” Dr. Vladimir Levin, director of the Center for Jewish Art at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in the statement. “Taking in consideration the unique historical and architectural features of the Chișinău cemetery chapel, it is obligatory to save it from destruction.”
The U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation has given more than $1.5 million to preserve Moldova’s cultural heritage since 2001.
The Fund was established by the U.S. Congress in 2001 to help countries preserve their cultural heritage and to demonstrate U.S. respect for different cultures around the world. AFCP projects strengthen civil society, encourage good governance, and promote political and economic stability around the world. The minimum amount of an award is $10,000, and the maximum is $500,000.
See announcement of the grant on the Ministry of Culture web site
Watch a Facebook video of the announcement of the grant: