Conegliano Veneto Synagogue and Museum of Italian Jewish Art

In the house where the Italian synagogue is now located, then there was a pilgrimage shelter.

The mission ceased to exist after the arrival of the British in 1918. And after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1951, an eighteenth-century synagogue from the small Italian town of Conegliano, located sixty kilometers north of Venice, was moved to this building. It was dismantled, brought to Jerusalem and revived on the “Schmidt’s Compound”, where Jews from Italy gathered for prayers.

The synagogue now looks the same as it originally did. At the eastern wall there is a cabinet for a Torah scroll, opposite it a podium from which the sacred scroll was read. Along the northern and southern walls stretch benches for parishioners. From above, the hall surrounds a balcony for women, hidden from the lower, male half, with a beautiful carved wooden screen-partition. There is a small refectory in the building. Its walls are decorated with paintings on biblical subjects with captions in German, Greek, Arabic, Latin and Hebrew.

On the second floor of the synagogue there is a small but remarkable museum of Italian Jewry. The museum opened its doors in 1982, and here you can see various elements of Judaica from different eras, from the 15th century to the present day.