25.04.2020 – 07.30 – The first Jewish cemetery in Trieste dates back to 1446, when an Israeli from Trieste, Michael, bought a plot of land in Via del Monte, in the district of
Santa Caterina.
The ancient cemetery grew in size, until over the centuries it occupied part of the hill of San Giusto.
When Emperor Joseph II ordered – for health reasons – that the cemeteries had to be placed outside the city, the Jewish community began to bury their dead in the present location of Via della Pace, from June 1, 1843.
The cemetery is known in Jewish tradition as “bet ‘olam”, that is, the house of eternity; the dead cannot be exhumed, nor can the tombs be violated.
Therefore, when the Municipality of Trieste wanted to transform the hill of San Giusto into a park – now known as “della Rimembranza” – the ancient cemetery was expropriated (1909).
On this occasion several sarcophagi of rabbis dating back to the mid-eighteenth century were saved, as well as 800 funerary stones.
Unfortunately, most of them were entrusted to the caretaker, who chiselled the dedications away and used the other side to carve the name of the new deceased, “recycling” them.
The Jewish cemetery of Trieste, which is still situated in Via della Pace, retains some peculiarities: starting from the “cave” tombs, or dry embedded mounds of stones from the Karst, widely used between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
Most of these tombs have unfortunately collapsed, revealing gravestones of the previous cemetery in Via del Monte.
The funerary stones show mostly Jewish symbols, but there is no lack of classical “coats of arms”, such as the hourglass, the moth, the alpha/omega, the uroboron; the Masonic symbols characteristic of many Trieste cemeteries are not to be missed.
Particular of sad topicality, many deaths in the cemetery are due to “Asian disease”, that is, cholera epidemics, usually entire families rest under a single tomb. Those who know the history of the city will be familiar with the names of the families of insurers and merchants who ensured Trieste its status as a port city between the 18th and 19th centuries: the Morpurgo, the Parente and Baron Fortunato Vivante among many.
There are many people of Jewish origin in Trieste whose (imposing) tombs can be found. But between the tombstones and the stems, there are surprises: stories of men and women encapsulated in time thanks to the details of the epigraphs, coats of arms, the last gestures.
Fragments of a distant world, yet not so different from the present one. A plaque in the name of Joel Wölfler, who died in 1843, reveals how he was “killed by the cruel hand of a murderer who was not a child of the pact”. What is it about?
According to research in Livio Vasieri‘s archive, Joel was in prison at the time where he shared a cell with a rabid-hearted companion of misfortune.
Joel took a course to work as a carpenter, while his cellmate was a cobbler. The two were eating, when Joel was accused by the other of stealing a piece of bread from him; soon it degenerated into a fight and his cellmate stabbed him in the stomach with a stitching awl, a large curved needle used by shoemakers.
Another grave that arouses curiosity is that of Moisè Hierschel, known as “the beggar”.
Hierschel, in fact, dealt for a long time with the funds for the charity of the Jewish community; but he was in turn a very generous philanthropist. In Trieste, in the middle of the century, he managed a considerable number of properties; from the house of the Rossoni Gallery, to the pre Tergesteo building and the block between via Roma and via Filzi. And as if that were not enough, he was also the owner of the Teatro Grande, today Teatro Verdi. A generosity that hid a troubled heart: decades earlier, in 1807, Hierschel had seen a terrible tragedy happen in the very theatre that he would later buy. His young wife and her mother, who came to the theatre for a performance, would be stabbed to death by a madman on their stage.
An honest servant of the State was Moses Fuchsel, a citizen of Jewish origin whose tombstone is decorated with a laurel branch intertwined with a broken anchor. He died in 1894. Fuchsel was in fact a captain of the Austrian navy. Among his belongings at his death was found a Mexican honor, revealing how he had participated in the expedition of Maximilian of Habsburg, which ended in his tragic death by shooting. There is no lack of women from the Jewish community; for example, Fiorina Luzzatto Cohen, related to the poet and historian Samuel David Luzzatto.
Her daughter, Irene Coen Luzzatto, who emigrated to the United States, will later become the mother of one of New York’s greatest mayors, Fiorello La Guardia, to whom one of the city’s airports is still named.
Or Amalia Popper, who was James Joyce’s favorite pupil, whose father Leopold, also buried in the cemetery, will become the inspiration for Ulysses’ Leopold Bloom.
[Sources: Livio Vasieri, Il cimitero ebraico ottocentesco di Trieste found in Gli ebrei nella storia del Friuli Venezia Giulia. Una vicenda di lunga durata, Giuntina, 2016]
Author: Zeno Saracino
Michael Guggenbichler translation
