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.

History

Marco Treves, who also designed the Great Synagogue of Florence, gave Vercelli's Jewish community a sanctuary in the Moorish Revival style then current across post-emancipation Europe, drawing on the same architectural language as Vienna's Leopoldstädter Tempel. Completed in 1878 on the site of the city's former ghetto, the building's red and white banded facade, twin turreted towers, and rose window set with a Star of David mark it as one of the most architecturally distinguished synagogues in northern Italy. A major restoration begun in 2007 returned the sanctuary to much of its nineteenth century splendour, and the building is cared for today by the Jewish Community of Vercelli, Biella, Novara and Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, which opens it to visitors by appointment.

Significance

Inside, three naves rise beneath stained glass windows patterned with stars of David, lit from twin matronei galleries where the congregation's women once sat apart. A marble memorial on the synagogue's outer wall names Jews of Vercelli and the neighbouring Piedmontese towns of Trino, Novara, and Biella who were deported and murdered in the Shoah, a quiet witness beside the building's continuing life as a place of prayer for one of Piedmont's oldest Jewish communities.

Architecture

Moorish Revival synagogue architecture