Museo Ebraico

Inscriptions and carvings line the entrance passage to this fascinating museum, which holds a collection that details the history of the city’s Jewish community. The recently extended and refurbished display is housed beneath the magnificent neo-Assyrian, neo-Greek Great Synagogue that was inaugurated in 1904. As well as luxurious crowns, Torah mantles and silverware, this museum presents vivid reminders of the persecution that was suffered by Rome’s Jews at various times throughout the city’s history. Copies of the 16th-century papal edicts that banned Jews from a progressively longer list of activities are a disturbing foretaste of the horrors forced on them by the Fascists and Nazis. The Nazi atrocities are in turn represented by stark photographs and heart-rending relics derived from the concentration camps, as well as film footage tracing developments in the post-war period. There are also a number of displays on the ancient Roman synagogue excavated at Ostia in 1964, as well as Jewish items from the city’s catacombs.