The Jewish cemetery in Conegliano

Not everyone knows that the city of Conegliano was once home to one of the most important Jewish communities in the Veneto region, both from a religious and a social point of view.

Currently, in Conegliano few traces of the Jewish presence remain ... The most evident testimony is certainly the Jewish cemetery inaugurated in 1545 on the Cabalan hill, one of the most evocative and scenic areas of the whole city.

The cemetery was used for centuries by the Jewish community of Conegliano, until 1882-84 when it was abandoned after the Jews were allowed to bury their dead in a private section of the municipal cemetery of San Giuseppe.

Abandoned for decades, also due to the dwindling local Jewish community, it fell into serious disrepair, but recently the Jewish cemetery was renovated by the Archaeological Group of Conegliano at the request of the Jewish Community of Venice, which owns it.

In the cemetery there are about one hundred and thirty gravestones, with most of them oriented towards Jerusalem. Originally the cemetery contained more, but many gravestones were lost due to negligence and land subsidence. The material used is sandstone or limestone, depending on the level of wealth.

The oldest epigraphs, mostly in Hebrew, show passages from the Bible; the more recent ones, from the nineteenth-century, are instead generally in Italian. Some gravestones have decorations with leaves, fake columns or with the indication of the deceased's family, with each one distinguished by a different symbolic emblem: the rooster with moon, stars and wheat refers to the Luzzato family; the tower with two rampant lions to the Grassini, the squirrel to the Goneian or Conian, which enlisted among their descendants also the Mozart librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (Emanuele Conegliano).

The beautiful town of Conegliano is only an hour's drive from Venice and is included in our private tour of the Treviso region departing from Piazzale Roma.