Museo Ebraico "Carlo e Vera Wagner"

The Jewish Museum “Carlo e Vera Wagner” preserves the history of Trieste’s Jewish community in a building in the former ghetto that the community has used since the late eighteenth century. Its collection includes Judaica from the city’s historic synagogues, household and communal objects, and material relating to the Shoah.

Why it matters

The museum opened in 1993 through the initiative of community president Mario Stock, Gianna Wagner and her husband Claudio de Polo Saibanti. The building previously housed an Israelite hospital and served as a shelter for refugees passing through Trieste’s port. The city was known as Shaar Zion, or “Gate of Zion,” for its role in this passage. The museum brings together objects from the community’s four historic synagogues and documents the life of the community and the history of the ghetto.

What to notice

The oldest object in the collection is a tass, a ritual Torah ornament, dated 1593. Other objects include a seventeenth-century pawn ledger and sovereign patents granted by Empress Maria Theresa in 1771. The ground floor preserves part of a Polish Beth HaKnesset, with an ark on the eastern wall and benches brought from the last ghetto schola. A lapidary garden displays tombstone fragments and remains of the Levi house, as well as two eighteenth-century stone basins used for ritual washing. The bilingual displays also include textiles, books, silverwork and family documents.

Context and history

The museum’s Shoah section documents the persecution of Trieste’s Jewish community. Personal belongings looted by the Nazis were recovered by the Allies, rediscovered in Rome decades later and returned to the community in 2000. The museum was reinstalled in stages in 2014–15; a second-floor space for temporary exhibitions opened in 2017. Its cultural programme includes lectures and films, and its research library supports study of Jewish history and contemporary history.