Italian Synagogue

This guide to the Italian Synagogue in Jerusalem follows a Rococo-gilded synagogue built in 1701 in the Jewish ghetto of Conegliano Veneto, Italy, from a Yom Kippur service in 1917 attended by Jewish soldiers slipping away from the Austro-Hungarian front, through the fading of its community and an Italian Jewish thinker's 1944 idea to move the whole building to Jerusalem. You'll hear how Venice's Jewish community came to give it away in 1948 and how workers dismantled the carved ark, benches and painted ceiling piece by piece for a ship called the Abbazia. Look closely at the gilded ark in front of you, the same one that blessed those soldiers a century ago.