With the relaxation of discriminatory anti-Jewish laws after 1848, an official Jewish community could again be established in Brno for the first time in 400 years. One of the first tasks was the founding of a cemetery; previously, local Jews had to be buried in the surrounding towns. To this end, the Jewish community purchased several remote plots of land in Juliánov, where a cemetery was inaugurated in 1852. A ceremonial hall was built in 1863 according to plans by the originally Silesian architect Anton Onderka. The cemetery was expanded over the course of the century, and with time even the ceremonial hall was no longer capable of meeting the needs of Brno’s Jewish community. In 1900 it was replaced by a new building by Josef Nebehosteny. Eleven years later, a new mortuary was built, also according to Nebehosteny’s plans, with offices and a flat for the cemetery manager and a room for ritual purification (taharah).
In his design for the new ceremonial hall, Nebehosteny sought inspiration from the nearly Great Synagogue on Spálená Street (destroyed by the Nazis in 1939), built in 1855 by the Viennese architects Johann Romano and August Schwendenwein in the Byzantine-Moorish style common for Jewish buildings in the 19th century. These were essentially Neo-Romanesque forms used on arched romantic historicist architecture. The ceremonial space has the form of a hall structure with a facade topped by a gable with the Hebrew inscription ‘This is the gate of the house beyond which all life ends.’ The interior is decorated with period ornamental paintings. Nebehosteny designed two other cemetery buildings in the same style, but only as single-storey structures and decorated to a lesser extent, with just an arched frieze and arched windows.
Moravia’s largest Jewish cemetery is home to some 9,000 graves, including lavish tombs built for Brno’s wealthier residents in the late 19th century. The cemetery serves as a place of memory, among other things in the form of an exhibition in the ceremonial hall showing fragments of medieval tombstones from Brno’s original Jewish cemetery, which was located south of the city centre on the site of today’s train station.
Matěj Kruntorád
