Cimitero Ebraico di Acqui Terme

On a slope above Acqui Terme, the Jewish cemetery records the history of a community present in the city since the late fifteenth century. Opened in 1836, it contains 830 graves, including burials of the Ottolenghi family, and a memorial to twenty-eight local victims of the Shoah.

Why it matters

Jewish life in Acqui Terme is documented continuously from the late fifteenth century, and by the mid-1800s the community counted roughly six hundred members — about one resident in eight. The cemetery on the slope above the town, opened in 1836 when the older burial ground could no longer serve a growing community, is the fullest surviving witness to that history. Eight hundred and thirty single graves span three generations of local families, from 1837 to the last burial in 2005. Among those buried here are seven rabbis and members of the Ottolenghi family — bankers, patriots and civic leaders: the rabbi who planted the tree of liberty in the ghetto square in 1799, the Mazzinian brothers who financed the Risorgimento cause, and a deputy mayor who directed the Antiche Terme spa while modernising the city.

What to notice

The upright matzevot combine classical, neo-Gothic and Baroque forms with Hebrew, bilingual and Italian epitaphs. Their carved symbols include the Star of David, lion, pomegranate, oil lamp and broken columns. The cemetery also contains graves of Eastern European Jews who died in Sanremo and Menton, a 2013 memorial bearing the names of twenty-eight local Shoah victims, and a garden dedicated to the Righteous, opened in 2015.

Context and history

The decision to open the cemetery in 1836 followed the familiar pressures of the age: the old burial ground on via Trucco blocked the town's expansion towards the Bormida and could no longer guarantee separate Jewish and Christian burial sites for a community of about four hundred and growing. Emancipation brought the community's golden age — crowned by the new synagogue of 1888 near the Bollente quarter, and by the prominence of the Ottolenghi in banking and the Risorgimento — followed by a long decline as families moved to the big cities; by the 1920s only thirty-one Jews were registered in Acqui. The racial laws of 1938 and the German occupation of 1943-44 nearly extinguished the community, which formally ended with the death of Rabbi Adolfo Ancona in 1952. The cemetery was later restored and remains an important place of remembrance for Acqui Terme's Jewish community.