Piedmont – The 16 Synagogues
When émigrés from France settled in the territories of the Duchy of Savoy on the Italian side of the Alps in Italy’s northwest, they formed the foundation of a unique Jewish community rooted in Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Italian traditions. Earliest records of this prosperous enclave in Piedmont date back to the 15th century. Turin has the most important Jewish community in Piedmont today and represents the third largest in Italy. The city, the historic capital of the Savoy Kingdom, offers three structures focused on Jewish culture: the synagogue, the school, and the retirement home. Alongside Turin, there are other centuries-old cities that demonstrate this vital cultural and artistic heritage. Numerous synagogues were built over a period of four centuries in nearly a dozen provincial towns. While many have since been dismantled, much of their contents have been saved and moved to other synagogues in Italy or Israel. The provincial towns are today home to Jewish museums and cemeteries and old ghetto areas. Early synagogues in Piedmont were probably single prayer rooms in private houses of the wealthiest members of each community, a common arrangement throughout Italy and in Europe. When ghettos were formally established in many Piedmontese towns in 1679, almost a century later than on the rest of the peninsula, they were usually formed around a large central courtyard from which all Jewish including the synagogue were entered.
Synagogues in Piedmont fall into two main groups: Smaller synagogues, built in the ghettos before the emancipation of the Jews of the Kingdom of Savoy in 1848, were nondescript on the exterior, unmarked on the streets. They occupied residential-type buildings. While they looked unobtrusive on the outside, inside they were decorated with notable rich baroque furniture and ornaments. These sanctuaries were usually located on the upper floors in order to benefit from greater security and better lighting. The other synagogues are post-Napoleonic, built after Charles Albert, King of the Savoy Regno di Sardegna, issued the Royal Decrees that afforded Jews, civil and political rights and permitted them to take on civil and military roles. Though emancipation arrived with Napoleon, it was only through Charles Albert’s decrees in 1848, that Jews were granted full rights. In 1861 when Turin, a cosmopolitan, cultural, and financial center, became the capital of the newly-born Kingdom of Italy, the middle-class local Jews were actively involved in the dynamic life of the city. Two years earlier the Jewish community commissioned a new, monumental synagogue as a tangible symbol of emancipation. Famous architect Antonelli designed a great interior expanse in a giant building, the so-called Mole Antonelliana. Yet the colossal area was unbearable to the Jewish community who donated it to the Turin municipality. Today’s main synagogue of Turin was erected in 1884 in a Moorish style. The other most prominent examples of Piedmontese synagogues are Carmagnola, an 18th c. temple located on the upper floor of a ghetto building; Casale Monferrato, one of the most opulently elaborate of the synagogues in the region; Cherasco, a tiny, baroque style room on the 3rd floor of a building entered through the ghetto courtyard and likely the most typical of the older synagogues (Jewish presence in Cherasco dates back to the 16th century; Saluzzo, Vercelli, just to mention the most significant. During WWII, in In response to Hitler’s initiatives, the Germans began to deport the Jews of Turin in 1943. A total of 246 Jews were sent to Auschwitz. Only 21 came back, one of those who did was the writer Primo Levi. Other prominent members of Piedmont’s Jewish community were the businessman Adriano Olivetti, the writers Carlo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg, and the Nobel Prize scientist Rita Levi- Montalcini.
Text by Lisa Sorba