Tahara house

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A tahara house is the building in which the corpse washing ( tahara ) of deceased Jews takes place before burial. It is located in Jewish cemeteries .

history

The oldest known Tahara house in Germany is located in the Jewish cemetery in Worms , it was donated in 1625 and restored in 1956. From the middle of the 19th century, mourning halls with rooms for the tahara were built in Germany in Jewish cemeteries instead of tahara houses . The morgue in Alsfeld was created for Jews and Christians together, but with separate rooms.

The construction of a Tahara house can be explained by the fear that the corpse could become ritually unclean on a long walk to the burial site. Tahara houses can be found almost exclusively in the association cemeteries in southern Germany, where corpses often had to be brought to the burial site over a long distance.

description

Modern washing facility in Yarkon Cemetery in the Tel Aviv area , 2011

The Tahara houses are mostly simple buildings and they have a similar layout and equipment. In the room for the washing of the corpses there is a Tahara table, which consists of a rectangular stone slab on a brick base or two supports. Later on, metal or ceramics were also used. The table is about two meters long and 70 cm wide. The table top usually has a recessed surface or a channel. It is clearly inclined at the foot end so that the water can flow off there after cleaning. In the floor of the room there is often a gutter in which the water is directed to an outlet pipe in the outer wall so that it can seep into the ground outside the building. The water for washing corpses is drawn from a well that is built in or near the building. The water is heated to the prescribed temperature on a stove. The tahara house is often used to store a wooden bier .

The Tahara house is often combined with living quarters for a cemetery attendant or other functional rooms.

Examples

Tahara house in the Jewish cemetery in Erlangen
View of the Tahara House in the southeast corner of the Bayreuth Jewish cemetery
Affaltrach Jewish cemetery with Tahara house
Tahara house of the Jewish cemetery in Bruchsal
Tahara house in the Kleinbardorf Jewish cemetery

Web links

Commons : Tahara House  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

  • Ulrich Knufinke: Buildings of Jewish cemeteries in Germany (= series of publications by the Bet-Tfila Research Center for Jewish Architecture in Europe 3). Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2007, ISBN 978-3-86568-206-2 (also: Braunschweig, Technical University, dissertation, 2005).
  • Ulrich Knufinke: Jewish cemetery buildings around 1800 in Germany: Architecture as a mirror of the conflicts over Haskala , "emancipation" and "assimilation". In: PaRDeS. Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies, Issue 11, 2005, ISSN  1614-6492 , pp. 68–101.
  • Wolfgang Kraus, Berndt Hamm, Meier Schwarz (eds.): More than stones ... Synagogue memorial volume Bavaria. Volume 1: Upper Franconia, Upper Palatinate, Lower Bavaria, Upper Bavaria, Swabia. (= Memorial Book of the Synagogues in Germany 3, 1). Developed by Barbara Eberhardt and Angela Hager with the assistance of Cornelia Berger-Dittscheid, Hans Christof Haas and Frank Purrmann. Kunstverlag Josef Fink, Lindenberg im Allgäu 2007, ISBN 978-3-89870-411-3 .