Today: flooding, sausage dogs & a potted Roman-Jewish history lesson.

So. The Synagogue Museum.

I sit on a wall outside and write before I go in; Jewish children in little cloth caps file out on a school trip and look at me like I’m crazy. Go inside, bending the truth slightly by saying that I’m going back to uni in January (I sort of am), and get my entrance for four euros instead of ten.

The guide first takes us to a room in the Spanish Synagogue, which is decorated lavishly with Hebrew lettering and candles. I find out that there are three branches of Judaism in Rome –the Sephardic, the Ashkenazi, and those that follow the Italian rites.

Spanish Jews have been in Rome since 1492, when Isabella and Ferdinand wanted to make a Christian community in Spain. However, there have been Jews in the city since 200 BC –so twenty two centuries of continuous Jewish presence in Rome. It is in fact the only city in Europe that has never expelled them. The ghetto was formed in 1555, and conditions were predictably bad –the Tiber regularly overflowing meant that the two thousand inhabitants lived their lives in permanent damp. How cramped it must’ve been can be imagined from the narrow streets in my pictures. Only one synagogue was allowed, despite there being different branches of Judaism in the ghetto, so five separate rooms were made within it.

Outside the doors to the Spanish Synagogue is the oldest artefact the museum has – a holy arch dating from the early sixteenth century, before the ghetto existed. The museum also holds more than eight hundred textiles that were used to protect Torah scrolls –they are embedded with gold and silver thread, which Jewish women would take out of their clothes and other furnishings.

We then troop into the Italian Synagogue –it is just as ornate as any Catholic church I’ve seen, and is completely beautiful. It was built in 1904, contains the only square dome in Rome, as well as Doric columns and stained glass windows. Its architecture has been described as ‘eclectic’, and it is a symbol of freedom and empowerment. The square dome is painted in the colours of the rainbow, which are still vivid after over a hundred years.

In contrast to our surroundings, the guide tells us a distressing story about the Roman Jewish community in 1939. In this year King Victor Emmanuel III signed an act to limit the rights of Jews –so, like in other parts of Europe, they were banned from attending regular schools and had to leave public office. Later, they were asked to pay a large amount of money in order that their lives would be spared. The community got the money together within thirty six hours, but the deal was not kept to and one thousand five hundred, mainly women and children, were immediately shipped off to concentration camps. Sixteen of these returned when the camps were liberated; in the meantime, Jewish books were stolen from the ghetto and taken to the north of Italy; they have not yet been recovered.

She then tells us that there was a public blessing taking place in this building in 1986, when a terrorist bomb went off. This is why there are still security checks as visitors enter the museum –it is still a working synagogue.

In the museum, when the tour has finished, I get a potted history of the community. I will recount it, briefly. In the Roman Empire the persecution of Jews began in the 4^th Century AD, when Christianity was established as the state religion. Hereafter, Jews were seen as being responsible for the death of Jesus. It was Venice, in 1516, that invented the ghetto – essentially just building a wall around the already insular Jewish quarter, and locking it at night. The Papal states, including Rome, were quick to follow. Different Popes were inconsistent in their treatment of the Jews, and the laws they passed regarding them. The Talmund, the text symbolising Jewish culture, was confiscated and burnt in 1533 in Campo di Fiori. There was also the practice of forced baptism, where children would be baptised against their parents’ wishes. In 1625, Pope Urban VIII banned Jewish names from appearing on gravestones –instead they would dedicate carved inscriptions to their deceased and have them mounted in the synagogue; this practice continued until 1848. Hebrew was and is the language of Jewish prayer and culture; Judeo-Roman is what would be spoken in the streets and at home. The Jews were educated, and despite how they were treated they were needed – knowledge of Arabic meant that many were used as translators for medical, scientific and philosophical tracts. In 1805 Rome was conquered by Napoleon, who freed the Jews and imprisoned Pope Pius VII, but when the French left in 1814 the old systems were reinstated. Partly through the help of the wealthy and influential Rothschild family, the ghetto was extended in 1814 to include the Fountain of the Tortoises.  

The ghetto was eventually abolished in 1870.

I go on to read about Jewish rites in the modern day, including Passover (Pesach), which commemorates the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. I didn’t know before this that the eating of unleavened bread came about because the bread didn’t have time to rise, the Jews had to leave Egypt so quickly. The collective experience of the Jews means that celebrations pay homage to events such as these; the eating of unleavened bread shows solidarity with their ancestors.

At the back of the museum is a room entitled Emancipation to Today, which covers the period from 1870 up to the present –including, of course, the Holocaust. I am the only person in the room, and I can’t hear anyone else in the rest of the museum either –I think everyone has gone on the tour. I want to read everything, but hanging at the back is a pyjama suit from a concentration camp and I feel so spooked by it, and by being the only person there, that I leave fairly quickly. The next room has a video on the Holocaust, which is without a doubt worse than anything I have ever seen before –it includes numerous executions.

After what the guide told us about only sixteen out of one thousand five hundred Jews returning to Rome after the liberations I find it very difficult to reconcile the museum I’m now in with the fact that it is stood exactly where these people were rounded up and shipped off to Auschwitz.

The video then goes on to talk about the migration of Libyan Jews into Rome, which is interesting in light of recent events. Four thousand Libyan Jews came to Rome after the 1967 pogrom, a result of the Six Day War. About half of these remained; the others went forward to Israel.

I leave, and outside find broken up plaques mounted all over the walls. Closer inspection reveals them to be the dedications to the deceased that Jews had put up in the synagogue when grave epitaphs were banned.

Feel very reflective. Stop at a cafe (the snappily titled Kosher Corner) for a very late lunch, and then head back towards the bus, and comforting routine of gymnastics, dinner, stories and bed.

***

At lunch on Wednesday, Lidia tells me that the trip to the amusement park on Sunday was not a success, despite it touting itself as the best in Europe. ‘We go for lunch at half past two,’ she says, ‘and there is nowhere to have lunch. Everywhere is closed!  And we go to the show, and the fairies are small and ugly... urgh.’

Lunch is once again minestrone, and I can only force half of it down. Afterwards I talk to Lidia for a while about Delhi –she and Alberto went ten years ago, and were as shocked as I was by the number of people sat listlessly at the side of the road.

The afternoon’s attempt to Skype the India group sadly fails after twenty minutes, when a fuse is blown and the hotel temporarily loses all its power. It’s very annoying, since I had a lot still to say –but I have to go get B&B anyway so there isn’t much I can do.

***

We stop off on the way home from school at a tiny shop near the Colloseum, which sells fancy dress costumes and vintage. Much debating over a pink frilly principessa dress is done, and Bene spends a lot of time dancing around wearing a long blonde wig and a tiara. Eventually, the princess costume goes in the bag, along with a red Indian, an ornate feather headdress and a couple of witches outfits for the approaching Halloween celebrations. The blonde wig and tiara go back on the shelf, and as we head back to the car we walk past Chocolate Boutique, which I have to stop and investigate, because really, who wouldn’t? It turns out it is salon that gives chocolate massages. I think it may become my new favourite place in the whole of Rome.

***

At home, B&B want to make sausage dogs from the insides of toilet rolls. I draw on my wealth of Rainbow experience to assist them in this. Bene’s sausage dog is a wonky-eyed triumph; unfortunately Bea loses interest after five minutes and is extremely displeased when I won’t abandon Bene’s cutting and sticking immediately and entertain her. This sets her off for the rest of the evening, and she completely refuses to play the matching up Smurf cards memory game with us later. Bene is loving it though, and I think this is the most successful game I’ve played with her. She starts saying what the Smurfs are doing in English too, which is good. Less good is that she smacks herself on the head every time she doesn’t make a correct pairing. D’uh.

***

Lidia had said earlier that the rain was supposed to come today, and she was surprised when instead she found bright sunlight. It doesn’t last long, and the rain does indeed come tonight. The rain (as bad as the rain we had here in July) is already battering the windows as I go to sleep. I am woken up three times during the night by a combination of wind, rain and growling thunder. It is like no thunder I have ever heard before. I turn off my alarm and go back to sleep at 8am, and don’t wake up until nearly ten, completely missing breakfast. I find that there is water underneath my window; it has leaked through the wood because I didn’t have my shutters closed. Have to lean out into the rain to reach them, which is not a particularly pleasant way to be woken up, and afterwards decide to abandon the plans that I had (Piazza Navona in this weather?) and spend the rest of the morning writing this blog and reading my Forster in bed.

***

It’s probably a very good thing that I didn’t venture out today. When I get to the Bellomos’ for lunch, I am greeted at the door by a very lively Bea, dressed in her Red Indian costume, complete with foot high feathered headdress. Bene skids out of their bedroom, squealing, still in pyjamas.

Alberto tells me that he didn’t take them to school this morning because two people have died on the roads as a result of the weather.

Now, I don’t mean to sound disrespectful or anything, but all the drama is starting to get ridiculous. Riots across England in August, two bombs, a hurricane and an earthquake in India in September, and now a weekend of violent ‘protests’ followed by potentially life threatening floods in Rome. I feel like the chaos is following me and that I might soon be doomed. Hello, Final Destination.


Gareth then sends me a picture of the floods via Facebook: 

The weather (at least where we are) seems to have cleared up by lunchtime, and Lidia tells me that they may go to the cinema this afternoon as planned. As they are seeing an Italian cartoon, my services will once again not be required. She assures me that there is food in the fridge for me to cook this evening, and I head down to reception with the laptop, where I discover that Colonel Gaddafi has been captured and according to Reuters possibly killed, although this is unconfirmed.

Consequently, a large portion of my afternoon has so far been spent refreshing the BBC homepage, although as yet (3pm, Rome time) I still don’t know whether Gaddafi is dead or not. I miss Sky News! If anyone has better access to the news than I do at this present moment I’d be grateful if they let me know, because not being able to get on an English news channel is driving me into a journo-geek frenzy. What IS going on?