Sinagoga Ebraica di Acqui Terme

In the street that once formed Acqui Terme's ghetto stands the synagogue inaugurated on the evening of 14 December 1888. Designed by engineer Leale in a Pompeian classical style, it was irreversibly vandalised in July 1971. Its shell survives as a solemn memorial of the Jewish community that shaped the town.

Why it matters

The synagogue was the gravitational centre of Jewish life in Acqui Terme — the municipal portal calls it the Beth ha-Keneseth, the house of meeting, used for feasts, Torah study, community assemblies and the school where children learned from about age four. Its story compresses the whole arc of that community: confidence in 1888, when a prosperous congregation opened a monumental new temple; decline as families moved to larger cities, leaving only 31 registered members by the 1920s; the fascist racial laws of 1938 and the deportations of 1943–44; and finally the night in July 1971 when, just before national-monument recognition, vandals destroyed the interior beyond repair. What remains is the intact perimeter, protected since construction by the heritage authority, and a memorial that demands explanation — the building is met today as a memorial shell rather than a furnished interior.

What to notice

The building stands on Via Saracco, within the area of the former ghetto, established in 1731 and dissolved in 1848. The hall was rectangular — the municipal page stresses it was "modern" in plan compared with the central-plan synagogues typical of Piedmont — and divided into two zones: the Tevah for the rabbi and officiants, and the public space with two rows of pews occupying two thirds of the room. In the Tevah wall sat the Aròn Ha-Kodesh, the sacred ark for the Torah scrolls, beneath the perpetually burning Ner Tamid lamp; a low marble colonnade with two fluted full-height columns separated it from the congregation, its entablature carrying the Tablets of the Law and the inscription "Ricorda davanti a chi sei" — remember before whom you are. Equally telling is what survived elsewhere: eighteen pews with book cupboards, two special pews flanking the ark, donor-list paintings and three Torah cases were transferred to the Temple of Alessandria, where they remain part of the region's Jewish heritage.

Context and history

The synagogue of 1888 replaced earlier accommodation at a moment when Acqui's Jewish community, present since the late fifteenth century and numbering roughly 600 at mid-nineteenth century — about twelve per cent of the town — still had the means for monumental building. Engineer Leale designed it in the classical Pompeian style fashionable for Piedmontese synagogues of the period, with biblical inscriptions chosen by Rabbi Lazzaro Ottolenghi for the inauguration. The community's rapid demographic collapse then left the building fragile; after the Second World War the remnant congregation was formally absorbed as a section of Alessandria under the 1930 law, and the community ended with the death of Rabbi Adolfo Salvatore Ancona in 1952. The 1971 destruction of the interior turned the former synagogue into a memorial, part of Acqui's broader Jewish heritage alongside the ghetto streets, Stolpersteine and the Jewish cemetery of 1836.