Hibernate: Removing item from a List does not persist

Try removing the calls to Session.refresh(). From the docs:

Re-read the state of the given instance from the underlying database. It is inadvisable to use this to implement long-running sessions that span many business tasks. This method is, however, useful in certain special circumstances. For example

• where a database trigger alters the object state upon insert or update
• after executing direct SQL (eg. a mass update) in the same session
• after inserting a Blob or Clob

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/api/org/hibernate/Session.html#refresh(java.lang.Object)

If you call flush() before refresh(), that might fix the problem too, since flush() guarantees that any pending SQL will be executed against the DB. In practice I've almost never seen anyone use refresh() and it doesn't look like from your code that you need it.

This chapter from the documentation is worth a read:

http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/reference/en/html/objectstate.html

You have to explicitly specify cascade as CascadeType.DELETE_ORPHAN.

Try to change code to

@OneToMany    
@Cascade(cascade = {CascadeType.ALL, CascadeType.DELETE_ORPHAN}, mappedBy = "temporal")

Part from hibernate docs:

If the child object's lifespan is bounded by the lifespan of the parent object, make the parent a full lifecycle object by specifying CascadeType.ALL and org.hibernate.annotations.CascadeType.DELETE_ORPHAN (please refer to the Hibernate reference guide for the semantics of orphan delete)

This is the currently recommended way.

@OneToMany(mappedBy = "temporal", orphanRemoval = true, cascade = CascadeType.ALL)