Saluzzo’s small Jewish quarter maintains its former appearance in the area around Via Deportati Ebrei. In one of the courtyards on this street stands a building containing a synagogue on its third floor. Constructed in the eighteenth century and remodeled in 1832, the prayer hall was designed to accommodate more than 300 persons. Notice the beautiful carved door, as well as the gilt ...
Plus d'infosContenus associés au mot-clé “monument”
Carmagnola
The most elegant of the region’s Baroque synagogues is found in the little city of Carmagnola near Turin. The city’s Jewish community was forced to live in a ghetto beginning in 1724. The temple is on the second floor of an eighteenth-century house opposite the former entrance to the ghetto. Passing through a vestibule decorated with frescoes, you will enter a prayer hall almost ...
Plus d'infosTurin
Turin, the capital of Piedmont, is a good point of departure for visiting other Jewish places of remembrance in the region. Turin was first the capital of the Duché de Savoie, then of the Kingdom of Sardinia. The Jewish presence was recorded by the Bishop Maximus of Turin as early as the fourth century. The only trace of Jewish presence to have been recorded then on only appeared a thousand ...
Plus d'infosPiedmont
Unjustly slighted as a tourist destination, Piedmont is one of the richest regions of Jewish heritage in Italy, with magnificent small Baroque synagogues like those of Carmagnola, Casale Monferrato, Cherasco, Mondovi, and Saluzzo. In 1848, the Piedmontese Jews became the first in Italy to definitively obtain full equality. The main restrictions on their residence or authorized economic ...
Plus d'infosModena
Modena’s former Jewish quarter became the ghetto in 1638. The narrow medieval streets have been completely opened up, widened during the vast renewal projects of the early twentieth century that give the city its appearance today. A beautiful oriental-style synagogue stands in the Piazza Mazzini, which is located on part of the former ghetto. Constructed between 1869 and 1873 on plans ...
Plus d'infosFerrara
The Jewish quarter of Ferrara, along with that of Venice, is one of the largest and best preserved in Italy. The Jews of Ferrara were not forced to live in the quarter until the beginning of the seventeenth century. As the capital city of d’Este dukes of 1598, the city was a center of Italian and European Judaism, with more than 2000 Jews of a population of 30000 during its golden age ...
Plus d'infosBologna
The first Jewish presence in Bologna is attested in an Epistle by Ambrose, Bishop of Milan towards the end of the fourth century. The former Jewish quarter of Bologna lies near the famous Due Torri, in the area marked today by Via Zamboni and Via Oberdan. It consists of a warren of small streets whose eloquent names such as Via del Giudei or Via dell’Inferno evoke the ...
Plus d'infosEmilia-Romagna
The rich region of Emilia-Romagna is definitely worth a two or three-day visit. Located on the south of the floodplain of the Po River, it includes cities like Bologna, home to a museum that is a model of modern installation techniques and location of the ruins of an ancient ghetto in the heart of the city, and above all Ferrara, once a very important center of Italian Judaism. A leisurely ...
Plus d'infosPisa
The old Jewish community of Pisa grew with the arrival of Jews from Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but, with the development of Livorno, steadily decreased in numbers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The current synagogue, constructed in 1756, has been remodeled several times, most notably at the end of the nineteenth century.
Plus d'infosLivorno
A visit to Livorno is required in the name of remembrance, even if the urban renewal projects of the early twentieth century around the port and the bombings of the Second World War in 1943-1944 have destroyed most of the old city center, including Jewish Livorno’s Grand Synagogue. In no other Italian city did the Jews have such a significant role as in Livorno, where they were never ...
Plus d'infosSiena
Siena’s ghetto was created at the same time as that of Florence in 1571. The large Jewish presence in the city is verified by documents from the beginning of the thirteenth century that mention a universita iudarum. The Jewish quarter is in the heart of the city, near the Piazza Campo and between the present-day Via San Martino and Via di Salicotto. The narrow little streets and tall ...
Plus d'infosPitigliano
Locates at the extreme south of Tuscany among the hills and cypresses, the borough of Pitigliano rises from a rocky pinnacle. Once called “little Jerusalem” by Tuscan Jews, the nickname points to the historical importance of Pitigliano’s Jewish community here, formed by those fleeing the Papal States after the edicts of 1555. The Jews remained here for almost four centuries, ...
Plus d'infosFlorence
The former ghetto of Florence was located in the heart of the old city center near the market in a zone totally destroyed and the end of the twentieth century, situated today between Via Brunelleschi, the Piazza della Repubblica, and Via Roma. Bernardo Buontalento, the grand duke’s architect, was commissioned to design the ghetto. The streets accessing the residential blocks were ...
Plus d'infosTuscany
With cities like Livorno and Florence, Tuscany represents an important part of the history of Jewish life in Italy, although evidence of the longstanding Jewish presence here is less abundant than in Venice and Piedmont. The large free port city of Livorno was the largest Jewish city of Italy between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The powerful Spanish-Portuguese community had what ...
Plus d'infosRome
The Jews in the capital of Italy are perhaps the oldest Romans of all. They have been settled in the same ancient neighborhoods in the heart of the Eternal City for 2000 years, making their homes in the former ghetto, in Trastevere, and on both sides of the Tiber River where it is crossed by the Ponte Fabricio or Ponte Quattro Capi. Not only one of the oldest communities of the peninsula, ...
Plus d'infosFaro
Capital of the Algarve region in southern Portugal, the city of Faro was home to a large Jewish community, expelled in 1497. A number of them continued to live there as conversos. Jews did not resettle “officially” in the city until the 19th century. In the fifteenth century, the time of its peak, Faro was a well-known center of Hebrew printing. In 1481, Samuel Porteira printed ...
Plus d'infosLisbon
The , designed by the architect Ventura Terra, was built in 1904. Its discreet facade opens onto a courtyard. The interior, built on the traditional plan of Ashkenazic synagogues, is decorated in the neo-oriental style. There is also a small oratory frequented by Jews of Ashkenazic origin on Rua Elias Garcia. In the (Museu Nacional d’Arte Antigua), note the figure carrying a book in ...
Plus d'infosCastelo de Vide
The Jews who lived within the walls of the little hilltop town of Castelo de Vide were engaged in the traditional activities of commerce, crafts, and sometimes medicine. The population grew after 1492 with the arrival of Jews from Spain. The former Judaria is fairly easy to identify around the market square (Praço de Comércio). Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the characteristic ...
Plus d'infosTomar
Although there was an organized community in Tomar at the turn of the fourteenth century, indicated by the inscription on the tombstone of Rabbi Joseph of Tomar, who died in Faro in 1315, it was not until 1430 that the Jews of Tomar had the means to undertake the construction of the synagogue. A building that still stands today. It was completed in 1460. After the expulsion of 1496 the ...
Plus d'infosBelmonte
The little community of Belmonte of between 100 and 300 souls was “discovered” in 1920 by the engineer Samuel Schwarz. Its existence was revealed to the world by Frédéric Brenner’s short film The Last Marranos in 1990. The Jews of Belmonte are one of the last groups bearing witness to the precarious life of Jews hunted by an all-powerful Inquisition and Church. They lived ...
Plus d'infosPorto
The name of the synagogue in Porto, Kadoorie, evokes the international reach of the Portuguese-Jewish community. Kadoorie is the name of a Portuguese-Jewish family that took English nationality and settled in Shanghai. Its members generously subsidized the construction of this fine monument with the help of the Portuguese communities in Lisbon, London, and Amsterdam in 1936. The synagogue has ...
Plus d'infosSeville
Seville’s Santa Cruz quarter, protected by the Alcazar, was formerly the city’s famous judería. The maze of streets and their evocative names give a good idea of what it was like in 1492. Be sure to stroll around the Calle de la Judería, Callejón del Agua, Calle des Levis, and the Calle de Santa María, which may have been the main street. The name of the Calle de la Susona ...
Plus d'infosCórdoba
Homeland of Maimonides, Cordoba was under the Arab Caliphate of Abderahman III the greatest Andalusian juderia. Under the Muslim rule, the Jewish community lived in harmony with the conquerors who, to save their armies, entrust to the Jews the administration of Seville and Cordoba. The history of the Jewish community of Cordoba follows that of the Arab occupation and Almohad and Almoravid ...
Plus d'infosLucena
Famed in the eleventh century for the influence of Talmudists such as Isaac ibn Gayata, Isaac Alfasi, and Joseph ibn Migas, who founded the so-called “Lucena School”, Lucena preserves few material signs of its Jewish past. While the site of the Judería is reasonably well established, that of the synagogues is uncertain. However, two popular customs recall the Jewish heritage: the ...
Plus d'infosGranada
Granada’s splendor was at its apogee in the eleventh century, when Samuel ha-Nagid and his son Joseph were in charge of the kingdom. The large Jewish population exceeded 5000 and reached 20000 by the eve of expulsion. Sadly, the Judería was destroyed by order of the Catholic monarchs. In Granada’s center (Calle Pavanderas), the modern statues of Yehuda ibn Tibbon and the Talmudist ...
Plus d'infosAndalusia
It is possible to date the presence of Jews in Andalusia to the Council of Elvira (303-09), when references were made to the need to separate Jews and Christians.
Plus d'infosBiel / Bienne
It was the clock-making industry that attracted Alsatian Jews to the Jura beginning in 1835. They opened their Moorish synagogue in 1884. Its most recent interior renovation, in 1995, stressed the contrast between sober walls and the twelve multicolored stained-glass windows featuring biblical subjects, the work of Israeli artist Robert Nechin. The 1999 exterior renovation brought back four ...
Plus d'infosBern
In the fourteenth century, the Jewish ghetto extended into the federal government’s current site: the Inselgasse, seat of the Department of the Interior, was called the Judengasse; the Federal Palace took over the spot of the Jewish cemetery. are not far away, on the Kapellenstrasse. An unusual feature of the Kornhausplatz is Ogre Fountain, which dates from 1544. For some, the statue ...
Plus d'infosZurich
Zurich contains the headquarters of the , founded in 1904 and whose archives were recently entrusted to the Zurich Federal Polytechnic School for better preservation there. The collection includes the documents from JUNA, the FSCI press office, the Union of Jewish Mutal Aid Societies, the Swiss Refugees Council, the Union of Jewish Students, and the Action Group for Jews in the Soviet Union, ...
Plus d'infosBasel
“In Basel, I created the Jewish State”, wrote Theodor Herzl in his diary after attending the First Zionist Congress, held from 29 to 30 August 1897. Nine more congresses would take place in Basel. A street in his name and a plaque in the casino serve as a reminder of the Zionist adventure’s origins in Basel. First opened in 1868, the is the work of the architect Hermann ...
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