Altrove/Elsewhere – Cuneo

By Daniel Leisawitz*

Having just returned from Italy, I find myself reflecting over the various places and people we encountered on our trip. Some of the most meaningful experiences took place in the small city of Cuneo, tucked away in the Northwest corner of Italy, in the mountain-ringed region of Piedmont. By no means a major tourist destination, this picturesque provincial city at the foot of the Alps contains a surprising Jewish history. Although it has always lived in the shadow of its larger Piedmontese neighbor, Turin, Cuneo was home to a small but significant Jewish community until the beginning of the 20th century, when equal rights and opportunities attracted most of the town’s Jews to larger urban centers. Reviewing the last names of the city’s major Jewish families from the community’s heyday – Cavaglion, Foa, Lattes, Momigliano, Segre – allows us to trace the journeys made by their ancestors in the late medieval and early modern eras across northern Spain (el Segre, a river in Western Catalonia) and southern France (Foix, a city on the French side of the Pyrenees; Lattes, a town in the Languedoc; Cavaillon, a city in the Vaucluse; Montmélian, a town in Savoie), and across the Alps into Piedmont.

The beautiful synagogue of Cuneo (known in Italian as the scola, analogous to the Yiddish shul, or “school”) is housed in a modest building on the street which once composed Cuneo’s ghetto, Contrada Mondovì. The only indication that the building houses a synagogue is the Hebrew epigraph running along the façade near the top: ve’asu li miqdash veshakhanti betokham (“And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them” Ex. 25:8). The graceful architecture of the façade is so understated that most residents of Cuneo that I mentioned it to did not realize it is a synagogue at all. The interior however, is handsomely decorated in the baroque style typical of many Northern Italian ghetto synagogues. A curious idiosyncrasy of this shul is the cannonball that is plastered into the front wall under the pulpit. It recalls the miracle that occurred in 1799 during a siege of the town by the combined forces of Austria and Russia. One evening, an enemy cannonball came crashing through the synagogue wall during the maariv service. Although the sanctuary was full of people, no one was hurt, and so it was declared a miracle. The occurrence was celebrated annually as the Purim della bomba (Purim of the Bomb).

Ironically, Contrada Mondovì, the site of Cuneo’s ghetto until its dismantling in 1848, is now one of the most fashionable streets of the old city, where residents and visitors come to shop, dine and relax. It was striking to see my young children eating ice-cream and gleefully dancing to the music of a dj set up outside the gelateria in the same street that just over 150 years ago they would have been forced to live in, locked between the heavy gates that were kept closed from dusk to dawn.

I was lucky enough to meet the brilliant and generous Dr. Alberto Cavaglion, professor of History at the Università di Firenze, and native Cuneese. As readers of Pagine ebraiche will know, he has recently founded a fantastic library and study center on the first floor of the Cuneo synagogue, dedicated to the study of Piedmontese Jewry. Named in memory of his beloved brother, Davide (who I had the pleasure of meeting several years ago, and who too soon has left us), the Biblioteca e Centro Studi sugli Ebrei in Piemonte ‘Davide Cavaglion’ houses a treasure trove of rare and fascinating books by and about the Jews of Piedmont, who have so profoundly marked the history of culture of modern Italy. A labor of love, Prof. Cavaglion sees the library as a necessity and even a point of pride, for, as he told me, “any scola worth its name needs books.” Although the synagogue is used only occasionally as a beit tefila (a house of worship), Prof. Cavaglion’s initiative has restored its function as a beit midrash (a house of study).

*Daniel Leisawitz, professor at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA). The artwork is by Abraham Cresques a 14th-century Jewish Spanish cartographer.