Vercelli Synagogue

About

The Vercelli Synagogue, known in Italian as the Tempio Israelitico, stands at Via Foà 70 in the Piedmontese city of Vercelli, northern Italy. It serves an Orthodox Jewish congregation whose history extends back many centuries, although the present sanctuary belongs to the era of nineteenth-century Italian synagogue building that followed Jewish emancipation.

The building was completed in 1878 to designs by Marco Treves, an architect born in Vercelli who also drew the plans for the Great Synagogue of Florence. Treves chose the Moorish Revival style that swept Jewish architecture of the era, with red-and-white masonry courses lending the façade its distinctive rhythm and a flat tripartite elevation rising to a raised central portion.

The form draws upon a wider European and American family of nineteenth-century houses of worship inspired by the Leopoldstädter Tempel in Vienna, designed by Ludwig Förster. Together these sanctuaries express the renewed civic confidence of post-emancipation Jewish communities reaching for an architectural language that affirmed both Jewish identity and the place of the synagogue within the modern city.

A major restoration was undertaken from 2007, returning the structure to its original splendour. The community has also borne the marks of contemporary antisemitism: on 23 November 2013 two swastikas were sprayed upon its walls. Through these challenges the congregation continues to gather for prayer.

Significance

The Vercelli Synagogue is one of the most architecturally distinguished synagogues of northern Italy and a notable expression of the Moorish Revival style that defined the public face of nineteenth-century European Jewry. Beyond its artistic merit it sustains the religious life of an ancient Italian Jewish community whose continuity in Piedmont is a quiet witness to centuries of Jewish faithfulness.