While traveling the world photographing Jewish women, I attended funerals rich in ritual. I accompanied women on their trips to cemeteries for family memorials, commemorating the death of loved ones (referred to as Yahrzeit in Judaism). I met women who had come long distances to visit ancestral graves and Holocaust memorials.
The tombstones (masevahs in Hebrew) that marked the graves, some dating from the Middle Ages, are now often viewed as works of art. Many, intricately carved with Hebrew epitaphs, documented the life of the individual. The most common symbolic relief on a masevah for a woman is Sabbath candlesticks or candelabra. A broken candle indicates a life tragically ended. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Jewish Enlightenment movement among European Jews (called Haskalah in Hebrew) would eventually transform tradition, especially for women's tombstones. The Haskalah movement, which originated in Germany and quickly spread throughout Europe, sought to free Jews from ghetto life and help them enter the mainstream of European culture.
But these changes kept within the bounds of age-old Jewish tradition and Rabbinic religious law (Halakah) regarding masevahs, expressed by modest decoration. For the most part a human figure was never depicted, adhering to the biblical commandment that "Thy shall not make stone images of what is in the sky above and the earth below."
With time came greater lattitude. Russian and Bukharan Jews would add photographs. Headstones would become more elaborate, epitaphs embellished with additional Jewish symbols and inscriptions written in Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German and English, as well as Hebrew, especially in modern Bukharan and American Jewish cemeteries where sculpted busts of deceased women can be seen affixed to towering tombstones.
In a recent article in Lilith magazine, author Amy Stone reviews the impact of feminism on Jewish burial ceremonies. She cites artist Susan Dessel's installation honoring the first Jewish community that settled in New Amsterdam in 1654. She notes that women were remembered on their tombstones as "wife of," "mother of," "daughter of." Today, women want their epitaphs to include the many other roles and challenges they successfully took on in life.
