History, characteristics and historical-artistic highlights
Note by Andrea Morpurgo
Over the centuries, scholars have mentioned ancient Jewish cemeteries in Bologna, the most important of which was reportedly the sixteenth-century one in what is now via Orfeo, near a convent of nuns. The four monumental tombstones preserved in the Museo Civico Medievale di Bologna are said to come from this cemetery.
The first records regarding the establishment of a new burial ground come from a direct source, namely the memoirs of Rabbi Marco Momigliano, who held the rabbinical chair of Bologna from 1866 to 1896. Upon Rabbi Momigliano's arrival, there were about 300 Jews in Bologna, and they were in need of both cultural and religious institutions. The community urgently needed a burial place, having until then used the Protestant section for the burial of its deceased. In 1869 the cemetery was already in use, and Momigliano also worked to establish a Misericordia society to provide for the transport costs of deceased indigent people.
The current Jewish section, as it appears now, covers a vast area of land of about 7.000 square metres and has two entrances, one connecting it directly to the Certosa, and the other independent with an iron gate facing outwards onto via della Certosa. In the oldest section of about 1.000 square metres with around 384 graves, the mortuary chamber was also built in 1867, currently consisting of a single, very simple room without architectural features, where funeral services take place before burial. Over time, this section has taken on a monumental appearance and is therefore worthy of historical and artistic consideration, also representing, through the numerous headstones—many of which are no longer legible as they have deteriorated over time—a cross-section of the community's history from its reconstruction to the early decades of the twentieth century. In the middle section, added around 1930, monumental graves disappear, and in the last enclosure, annexed in 1956, the burials consist of simple marble slabs.
Among the most important graves, mention should be made of the Art Nouveau style ones by the sculptor Silverio Montaguti dedicated to Benedetto Zamorani, the monumental tombs of the Sanguinetti, Zabban, and Padoa families, the graves of Rabbis Momigliano and Castelbolognesi, and in the middle section the graves of the family of Attilio Muggia, an important architect and designer of the 1928 Synagogue, and the Finzi aedicule, a fine example of modernist architecture created by the architect Enrico De Angeli.
Historical timeline
1867: opening of the first section
1930: opening of the second section
1956: opening of the third section
For Italian Judaism not only the synagogue but also the cemetery represents a very strong space of identity, and, with the achievement of civil and religious rights, a new form of “visibility”, in continuous dialogue between normative-religious issues, linked to tradition, and stylistic-formal choices, which tend to make the architectural and decorative trends of the moment their own.
