4. The Synagogue of Florence

The Synagogue of Florence

Attractions Museum Synagogue
SITE OVERVIEW

The Synagogue of Florence is a great monumental building, a place of worship and integral part of the history of the city. The Synagogue was inaugurated in 1882, after the emancipation of Italian Jews and decentralized from the area of the old Jewish Ghetto which was demolished in the last decade of the 19th century. In the period in which Florence became the Capital City of the Kingdom of Italy, between 1865 and 1870, the Synagogue became a symbol of the acquired freedom characterized by its green copper dome and its façade. Inside you will feel a very impressive atmosphere typical of the oriental taste of the European monumental synagogues built in the late 19th century. Thanks to its monumental architecture, the Synagogue stands out and affirms the integration of the community within civil society, and the achievement of equal rights.

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Spanish Synagogue of Ferrara

A plaque at n° 41 Via Vittoria commemorates the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century, then taken in by Duke Ercole I Este, who saw them as a resource for his capital city. The exiled were deeply rooted in their cultural heritage, and immediately established their own independent prayer hall and built a cemetery. The synagogue remained open until the Second World War, and was closed after the Nazi-Fascists raided it. It was on the first floor of the building, and has the traditional two-sided layout with the tevah opposite each other on the shorter sides, and public seating facing the central aisle. After the war, the Baroque furnishing was partly salvaged and relocated elsewhere. The tevah and the central polychrome marble section of the Aron were transferred to the winter prayer hall of the Jewish community in Livorno, named after the Ferrara-born Rabbi Isacco Lampronti, who had commissioned the ark in 1710. The sides of the Aron, made in wood and green lacquer are in the hall of the former Italian Temple. In the 1950s the synagogue was converted for residential use. This synagogue was the hub of an extremely cultured Sephardic community that had had many prominent figures from the 16th century onwards including Abraham Usque, who was a famous printer and published the “Ferrara Bible” (1553), a Judeo-Spanish translation of the Bible; his sons were Samuel and Salomon, the latter remembered for his Spanish translation of Petrarch. There was a circle of Jewish and Christian intellectuals, led by Samuel Abravanel (1473-1547) and Dona Grazia Mendes (1510-1569), who greatly helped the conversos (Spanish Jews who had converted to Catholicism) return to their roots and Amato Lusitano (1511-1568), essayist and lecturer at the faculty of medicine.
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The Jewish Story of Pisa, Italy

Although according to historical sources, Pisa is a city of very ancient origins, the great expansion of the mediaeval city seems to have erased most evidence of Etruscan or Roman settlements. When it became a free commune in the 11th century, Pisa was already a maritime power engaged in the struggle against the Saracens and Arab expansion. The Maritime Republic flourished in the following century. Now, the city’s most famous landmark is the cylindrical Tower built from 1173 to the end of the 14th century which, because of subsidence, now ‘leans’. The base is decorated with blind arcades surmounted by six rings of arcades galleries enclosing a staircase of 294 steps leading to the very top of the tower, where Galileo performed his famous experiments on gravity. Benjamin of Tudela, during his voyage from Spain to Jerusalem, also traveled through Pisa in 1160 and noted in his dairy that he had found around twenty Jews living there. Pisa’s Jewish community is thought to be the oldest in the whole of Tuscany: the first evidence of a mention in a deed dates back to the year 850 CE. The first group settled and increased in numbers over the centuries that followed with several migratory waves. Unlike Florence and Siena where the Medici introduced a ghetto, in the late sixteenth century Livorno and Pisa expressly invited Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula, offering them freedom and protection so as to boost trade in their maritime territories. Levantine Jews specialized in commerce and manufacturing, and they were soon to become the majority. However, in the same period, money lending was outlawed after centuries of activity, and due to the city’s economic problems the community moved, mainly in Livorno. [caption id="attachment_40280" align="alignnone" width="2560"] Image credit: www.visitJewishItaly.it[/caption] During the seventeenth century Pisa’s community dwindled to less than three hundred people, a trend reversed only in the early nineteenth century, when it totaled six hundred people. Over the centuries, the Jewish Community has always actively participated in a range of the city’s activities.
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Ghetto of Padua

There are various traces indicating a stable Jewish presence in the city from the late 13th century. The group lived in relatively peaceful conditions, working mainly as merchants and moneylenders, for as long as the city was ruled by the Carraresi family (1318 – 1405). When the city was taken over by the Venetian Republic (1405), there was a gradual worsening of conditions, particularly with regard to business activities. However, the Jews were still permitted to graduate from the city’s prestigious university, albeit paying additional fees. It was from that period on, in fact, that Padua became an important hub for Jewish studies, hosting eminent academics. The Jews were segregated in the ghetto in 1603. The area adjacent to Piazza delle Erbe was chosen, as the Jewish community had been concentrated there for some time and there were already Jewish shops and two synagogues in the area. Guarded gates isolated the ghetto during night hours: two on what is now Via S. Martino e Solferino (one just beyond Via Roma and the other on the corner of Via dei Fabbri), one at the beginning of Via dell’Arco, and another along Via delle Piazze. The residential area, for which high rents were charged, was cramped and unsanitary (containing 655 inhabitants in 1616); this led it to be developed in a vertical direction, by constructing tall buildings with low ceilings on each floor, such as in the residential towers on Via dell’Arco. The main hub of the area was the courtyard of the Scola Todesca (Via S. Martino e Solferino, 20); according to a never-completed project, this courtyard was intended to englobe the adjacent Corte dei Lenguazzi, to become the ghetto’s central square. The segregation order was dropped with the arrival of the French in 1797, and was not restored when the city came under Austro-Hungarian rule. Full equality was achieved in 1866 with the city’s annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. Even after the ghetto was abolished, the community’s main existing institutions – the synagogues, the Rabbinical College, and the school – remained in this area. Guided tours can be booked through the Museo della Padova Ebraica
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Museum of Jewish Padua

The museum is in Padua's Old Town, in the area of the Ghetto, inside the building of the former German Synagogue, the Scola Grande, built in 1682. In May 1943 the building was almost completely destroyed by flames set by the Fascist Squadrons and then restored by Padua's Jewish Community in the post war period. In the museum are displayed traditional objects of the Jewish community, among which some Ketubboth (Wedding contracts), ritual objects for family use (candlesticks, spice-holders, plates for Pesach, glasses for Kiddush) and ritual objects for the synagogue (crowns, Sefer Torah, prayer books, musical scores, precious textiles). An Egyptian Mameluke manufacture parokhet dating back to the first half of the 16th century and Megikllath Ester manuscripted and decorated on parchment (18th century) are noteworthy. A central and innovative element of the museum is the video installation “A generations goes, a generation comes” by the film conductor Denis Brotto. Ten representative personalities of history of the Jewish Community in Padua “get alive” together with the history and the places of the Jewish life.
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Spanish synagogue

Looking up to the top of the building at number 8, Via S. Martino e Solferino, one notices two windows with colonnettes supporting an architrave; now the place is a private home. Now a private home, the top floor of the building used to house the Spanish rite synagogue, which the Marini family had built, beginning in 1617. In 1629, just a few years after its inauguration, the hall was seriously damaged by fire. It was later rebuilt and refurnished, and obtained its final layout in 1770. Like the Italian synagogue, it was an elongated rectangular space. Its tevah and aron were made around 1729, and are placed at the centre of the longer sides. Here too there was a raised tevah with steps to either side and a baldachin with volutes. The synagogue was active until 1892, after which only the Scuola Grande remained in use following the unification of religious rituals. After the war its furnishings were transferred to Jerusalem, and in 1958 they were relocated to the Hekhal Shlomo complex. In the current arrangement, in addition to different coloured paintwork, the tevah has been placed in the centre of the room, thus losing its original position against the wall for which it had been specifically designed.
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Italian Synagogue

Only one of the three synagogues is still in use today. It was founded in 1548, perhaps to replace the previous Italian rite synagogue located in Piazza delle Legne. Having been transferred to its current site as late as 1603, its interiors were completed during the 17th century and it was further renovated in the 19th century. It remained active until 1892, when the entire community decided to follow the Italian rite as standard, keeping only the Scuola Grande on Via delle Piazze in use. However, the Italian Synagogue was later restored after the Second World War, when the Scuola Grande was destroyed by fire and rendered inaccessible. The hall is situated on the upper floor of a building which bears no external features to indicate its function. It has an oblong rectangular layout, organised according to the traditional bi-focal arrangement, with the aron and tevah placed centrally on opposite walls, in this case along the longest sides. The seventeenth-century aron hakodesh has features in common with altars in various churches in Veneto from the same period. It is enclosed by carved, gilded wooden doors and is framed by an aedicule structure with veined grey marble columns and a semi-circular divided tympanum. On the opposite side, it is faced by an elaborate canopied tevah. This tevah, in keeping with a local tradition, was made entirely out of timber from a plane tree in the Botanical Gardens which had been struck by lightning in the 16th century. It has a raised base accessed by two curved staircases on either side. The perimeter of the room is decorated with wooden panelling with seating for the public from the late seventeenth-century. The upper section of the woodwork, with marmorino inlaid panels, dates from work carried out in 1831, when it replaced gilded leather panels.
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Via Wiel Jewish cemetery

The most ancient Jewish cemetery remaining in Padua is located in via Wiel. It was used from the 16th until the 18th century and it is located outside the Medieval city walls, but protected by 16th century bastions. It was enlarged in 1653 thanks to Salomone Marini, rabbi of the “Università degli ebrei Portoghesi di Padova” (“University of Portuguese Jews in Padua”). The cemetery hosts, among many burials, the tomb of Meir Katzenellenbogen. He was born in Prague in 1473 and died in Padua in 1585. He is the author of the “Responsa”, in which he explains the role of the rabbis of his age as Doctors of the Law rather than intermediaries between the Faithful and God. Rav Meir's and his son Samuel's (a talmudic rabbi himself) tombs, are visited by people from all over the world as shown by the small stones put on the tombstone. Another famous tombstone is the one of Abram Catalan, a doctor from Padua; during the 1630-31 plague epidemic he was commissioned, with three other Jewish doctors, to watch life conditions in the Ghetto, taking the necessary measures to contain the contagion. In that period 722 people lived inside the ghetto of Padua: 634 of them were affected by the plague and 421 died. Those dead were probably buried in mass graves as no evidence has been found inside the cemetery.
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Via Cavalca Old Synagogue

There is evidence of a synagogue in the house at 36, via Cavalca, dating back to the early fifteenth century. As in most cases at the time, the synagogue was rented or purchased by the Community’s notables, and annexed to their house. The building on Via Cavalca was the da Pisa family’s residence, bankers who had held the monopoly of money lending for almost a century, following the Florentine government’s decision to group all the lenders into one institution. In the course of its history, the Jewish community concentrated in a one area or another of the city. Towards the end of the thirteenth century there are references to an area near Piazza dei Cavalieri, known as “chiasso dei Giudei”. In the early fifteenth century the Jews concentrated in the Via Cavalca area, and in the late sixteenth century with the arrival of the Levantine merchants, in the opposite bank of the River Arno and settled in the Palazzo da Scorno (Via da Scorno / Lungarno Galilei). Finally, a few years later, the Community acquired its current premises in Via Palestro, which it rented in 1595 and purchased in 1647.
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The Pardo Roques House

Abramo Giuseppe Pardo Roques (1875 - 1944) was President of Pisa’s Jewish Community from 1907 to 1910 and again from the early 1920s until his tragic death in 1944. On the morning of August 1st, a squad of German soldiers burst into his house in Via Sant’Andrea. Having seized all the valuables, they slaughtered Giuseppe Pardo along with eleven other people in the house: six other Jews who had sought refuge, three servants and two neighbours. Given that the break-in was made to look like a robbery, there is reason to suspect that an informer had collaborated, someone who knew that Pardo was Jewish maybe a neighbour who had recently moved and was known to be friendly with German soldiers. Giuseppe Pardo Roques was a prominent, well-respected figure in the city of Pisa. He came from a Sephardic family that had arrived in Livorno in the late nineteenth century; he had been deputy mayor of Pisa and his name had been associated with philanthropic activities in the city. A commemorative plaque can be seen on the façade.
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Synagogue of Pisa

Documents show that Pisa’s synagogue has occupied the same building since the end of the sixteenth century. Initially rented, the complex was purchased in 1647 and first renovated in 1785. In 1861-65 it was renovated again, to a project by the architect Marco Treves. Treves was a Jew from Vercelli working in Tuscany at the time, where he designed some major works for his Jewish clientele. The façade was redesigned, and is simple albeit echoing classical forms. The main hall of the synagogue on the first floor was raised, and Treves added both a second order of windows, and the large pavilion vault adorned with sober neoclassical decorations. The furnishings were rearranged according to layout that had become popular during the Emancipation, inspired by Roman Catholic churches: the tevah, enclosed by a semi-circular balustrade in walnut wood was placed next to the area of the Aron ha-Kodesh, creating a single focal point, like church cancels. The central space was entirely occupied by pews, in two sectors of parallel rows facing the Aron and the women’s gallery was on the opposite side, above the entrance.
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Jewish Cemetery of Pisa

The Jewish cemetery of Pisa is located in an attractive position just outside the section of city walls surrounding Piazza dei Miracoli, which is why in the twentieth century numerous Jews from other cities wanted to be buried here. It is one of the oldest preserved Jewish cemeteries still in use. It was purchased in 1674, and followed three previous burial grounds in the history of the Jewish community in Pisa. The oldest one dates back to the thirteenth century and was next to the Porta Nuova (New Gate) where epigraphs have been found carved into the city walls. A second one, listed in 1330 and perhaps used until the sixteenth century, was further south, on land belonging to the da Pisa family. The third, mentioned in surveys from 1618 and 1622, was also along the western walls, to the left of Porta Nuova. It seems to have remained in use for a short period until 1674, when the Grand Duke Ferdinando II requested the land for another purpose and offered the area of the current cemetery in exchange. The cemetery houses tombs from every period, most of them single graves. The oldest ones were simple consistently with the Jewish tradition, often belong to Jews of Iberian origins, descended from Spanish and Portuguese exiles who had been expelled from their countries in the late fifteenth century and welcomed a century later by the Grand Duke Ferdinando I with his so-called “Livornina” letters of invitation. In the late nineteenth century, when there was a tendency to assimilate with the dominant culture’s customs, elaborate monumental tombs in the popular styles of the time became more common. A plaque on the wall of the hall of rituals commemorates the Jews who were deported and killed in the Nazi death camps, along with the victims of the Casa Pardo Roques massacre.

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Ghetto Novissimo

In 1633 the Ghetto Novissimo was added to the existing two ghettos, mainly for the purpose of accommodating Ponentine Jews. Situated at the confluence between the San Girolamo and Ghetto Novo canals, it is the smallest of the three. The area was formed of three blocks of houses, with fine buildings (such as the Treves and Vivante palaces), but did not contain shops or scole. At the end of Calle del Portòn was the gate, which was kept closed.

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The Jewish Ghetto

Florence's ghetto was established by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1570. It covered the area facing today’s Piazza della Repubblica, between Via Roma, Via Tosinghi and Via Brunelleschi, according to the plan of grand-ducal engineer Bernardo Buontalenti. The daily life of the local Jewish population was spent in this gated area. Two synagogues – the Italian one, and the Spanish one – overlooked a central square, in which a well provided the entire community with water. Between 1704 and 1714 the ghetto was expanded as far as Via de’ Pecori: an edict by Cosimo II had in fact withdrawn the privilege granted to many Jews to live outside the ghetto, and it became necessary to increase the available residential space. The restrictive conditions were somewhat relaxed after 1737, when the House of Lorraine came to power. After an interruption during the years of French rule, the gates were definitively dismantled in 1848 and Jewish emancipation was recognized by the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. In the late 19th century, an urban requalification plan led to the demolition of the original buildings, and the construction of the blocks which still exist today. You will not, then, be able to see particular buildings or vestiges of the ghetto, but simply identify the area on which it once was.

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Cemetery of Caciolle

Many places once used as cemeteries have been identified. The first, across the Arno, at the Chiasso de’ Giudei, was replaced by a second near what is currently the Lungarno della Zecca; this in turn was supplanted by others, which were created in the Porta San Frediano area. Here in 1777 the plot was purchased on today’s Viale Ariosto, to house the new Jewish burial ground which still exists, although it is no longer in use. This was joined in 1884 by the Rifredi cemetery, designed by architect Marco Treves. When it will no longer be possible to use it, a new cemetery will be founded in the San Silvestro (Cercina) area, with its grounds designed by the architect Renzo Funaro.
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Cemetery of Viale Ariosto

“A corner of the city that’s hidden and unfamiliar even to most Florentines themselves”: such is the Jewish Monumental Cemetery, which opened in 1777 outside the gate of San Frediano and remained in use until 1870. A tall perimeter wall acts as a jealous guardian to protect, like a precious chest, a major cultural treasure. It is made up of funerary chapels and monuments, such as Cav. David Levi’s Egyptian pyramid-shaped tomb, which are timeworn yet worth visiting to discover this atmospheric place, which is emblematic of Jewish society. While there are none of the figurative works found in other Jewish cemeteries, some of the tombs are nothing short of sculptures, of considerable artistic value. Equally interesting are the funerary chapels in neo-Egyptian and neo-Renaissance style, such as that of the Franchetti family. The same styles are found in the oldest part of the Rifredi cemetery (13, Via di Caciolle), designed by Marco Treves (one of the three architects who designed the Tempio Monumentale) between 1881 and 1884. The recently-restored mortuary chapel takes the form of a central-plan temple in Renaissance style, with painted decorations on the inside. Jewish tradition does not allow for bodies to be exhumed, except in a few specific cases; generally more than one cemetery or “campaccio”, the term used to denote Jewish burial grounds, was found in each city. When the whole area had been covered by tombs, a new plot needed to be found, even though human and municipal circumstances often flouted this rule, requiring remains and tombstones to be moved elsewhere.
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Tabernacle of the Virgin Mary

On the side of the Church of Orsanmichele, in the penultimate niche on Via de’ Lamberti, is the tabernacle of the Virgin. It is connected with an act of intolerance which took place in 1493, when a Jew was accused of having vandalized the face of the Virgin Mary, a 14th century work by Giovanni Tedesco, and was subsequently executed. The inscription on the sculpture’s plinth reads: “Hanc ferro effigiem petiit iudaeus et index / ipse sui vulgo dilaniatus obit / MCCCCLXXXXIII”.
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