A matzevah is carved by an ordinary monument mason working to a Jewish community's specifications rather than by any specialized religious craftsman, with inscriptions traditionally in Hebrew, increasingly paired with the local vernacular, and a small set of carved symbols indicating lineage or role, hands raised in the priestly blessing gesture for a Kohen, a pitcher for a Levite, or a broken tree or candle for someone who died young.
Commissioning and timing
The family commissions the stone, and in many communities its formal unveiling is delayed roughly a year after burial, marked by its own small ceremony rather than happening at the funeral itself, a scheduling custom distinct from most other memorial traditions.
Permanence rather than retirement
Unlike almost every other object in this list, a matzevah is not designed with any disposal or retirement in mind at all, Jewish cemeteries are understood as permanent, graves are not reused, and stones are not removed or repurposed even as a cemetery ages for centuries. Where a stone has weathered past legibility, the answer is restoration or a new stone alongside it, never removal, since the marker's entire purpose is to outlast the people who could otherwise have remembered the grave without it.