Florentine HolidayMaimon Schwarzschild

It was the Jewish holiday of Shavuot this past weekend, and I went along to the great synagogue in Florence – one of the Italy’s grandest synagogue buildings.  It  was built in the 1880s, at the height of the Florence Jewish community’s prosperity.  The building is 19th century “Moorish”, and the religious ritual is “Spanish and Portuguese” – unlike in Rome – since the Jews in Florence were under the sway of refugees from Spain who settled in large numbers in the nearby port of Livorno after the Spanish expulsion of its Jews in 1492.  The refugees and their descendents found a safer haven in Italy.  For a while.

But at the Shavuot services there were barely a dozen people in attendance.  The reason is memorialized in stone in the synagogue forecourt.   Most Florentine Jews were deported and massacred by the Nazis in 1943 and 1944.  The memorial lists the names of those killed.  In many cases there are eight or ten people with the same family name: entire families wiped out.

Italy is lovely to visit.  But a Jewish traveller, surrounded by the ghosts – and perhaps not just the ghosts – of European horrors, is grateful to the United States.