History of the Jews in Venice

When the Germans came, their guttural pronunciation changed the Venetian term from getto into ghetto, creating the word still used today to indicate various places of emargination.

The unusual tall buildings found here were divided into floors of sub-standard height, demonstrating how the density of the population had increased over the years.

In September 1938, the promulgation of the fascist racial laws deprived the Jews of civil rights, and the Jewish community entered a difficult period under the leadership first of Aldo Finzi and subsequently (from June 1940) of Professor Giuseppe Jona.

[6] In November 1943, Jews were declared 'enemy aliens' in accordance with the manifesto of the Italian Social Republic, to be arrested and their property seized.

Although some Jews managed to escape to neutral Switzerland or Allied-occupied southern Italy, over two hundred were rounded up, most between 5 December 1943 (when approximately 150 were arrested) and late summer 1944.

[7] Most of those arrested in the summer of 1944 spent time incarcerated at Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp, Trieste.

Its main goal is to make a wide range of resources on Judaism, Jewish civilization, and particularly the history of Italian and Venetian Jews, accessible to a vast public, and to promote knowledge of all these subjects.

The precious objects shown to public, important examples of goldsmith and textile manufacture made between the 16th and the 19th centuries are a lively witnessing of the Jewish tradition.

With the objects displayed in window 3 the Days of Repentance, Rosh Ha Shanà and Yom Kippur, opening the Jewish year, are introduced.

The festivity of Purim happens about at the end of winter and it is a feast of joy during which Meghillat Ester is read (the scroll of handwritten manuscript where this story is told is on display on window 8.

Besides this room keeps important witnessing about Marriage and Birth: several Ketubboth, the stereotyped form of wedding contract, extremely relevant, above all in the past times, for the protection of woman in case of dissolution of marriage, allowed by Jewish tradition; and a 1779 set of clothes for the circumcision, rite of basic importance that shows the entrance of the new-born Jewish boy in the alliance stipulated by the Lord with Abraham and his descendants.

After this date, the widening of system of fortification of the Lido, wanted by the Serenissima Republic to defend itself from the Ottoman Empire, brought to a slow but constant reshaping of the cemetery spaces southbound, so that in 1736 the "University of Jews" was forced to buy a piece of land bordering it.

The fall of the Venetian Republic, the foreign occupations and the consequent vandalism, as well as the atmospheric agents brought to the disappearance of many monuments and to the ruin of the Jewish cemetery.

In the 19th century, because of the project to make the Lido of Venice healthier and competitive, part of the Cemetery (now belonging to the state) was expropriated and bound to other uses.

In 1999, thanks to the collaboration of public and private enterprises, both from Italy and abroad, restoration of Antico Cimitero Ebraico di Venezia has begun; many memorials have been saved and classified more than 1000 of them which can be dated between 1550 and the early 18th century.