The city of Trieste, practically at the border with Slovenia, due to its geographical position, has always been and still is a melting pot of different cultures: Italian, Austro-Hungarian mittle European, and Slavic. All of these cultures have always been well represented in the local Jewish community.
The first Jews who settled here arrived in the XVII century and grew steadily until the first part of the XX century.
In the first half of the 20th century Trieste and its Jewish population were the first to experience the tragic consequences of the three dictatorships that so tragically marked the destinies of Europe and the world for the rest of the century and beyond: Trieste was the city where Benito Mussolini announced on September 18th 1938 the Racial Laws that targeted specifically Italy’s Jewish population; nearby Trieste was built the only nazi concentration camp on the Italian soil, the Risiera di San Sabba; Trieste was the border city that bore the brunt of the communist troops of General Tito, later to become President of Yugoslavia, who carried out an ethnical cleansing against the Italian population in the nearby areas and threatened to invade Trieste; and last, but not least Trieste was one of the main Italian ports from which Jews from all over Europe, most of them survivors of the camps, left by boat to make aliya to Eretz Israel.
Our itinerary will take us first to the Synagogue, one of the largest and majestic in Europe. It was opened in 1912 and it symbolises the influence that the local Jewish community had achieved in the economics and cultural life of the city. We will then visit the area of the old ghetto and the Jewish Museum where you will be getting an interesting historical and cultural insight not only of the local Jewish Community, but also of this very interesting city. Last stop of our Jewish tour of Trieste will be the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp on the outskirts of the city.
Nowadays only two Jewish families still reside in Casale Monferrato. However, this small town in the countryside of the Piedmont region once had a numerous and prosperous Jewish community that had started settling here since 1492. In fact this was the year marking the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, some of which, for some […]
There are sources mentioning the presence of Jews in the city of Verona as back as the VI century AD. Though possible, the first certain sources show that by the XIII century the number of Jews residing in Verona was quite sizeable. At that time a Rabbinical Court was active and two famous Rabbis both […]