Old Synagogue of Vlorë

OVERVIEW

The story of Old Synagogue of Vlorë

Vlorë, the Italian Valona and Hebrew Avilona, is a port on the Albanian Adriatic coast. In the early sixteenth century it held one of the largest Jewish communities in the Balkans: Ottoman records of 1520, quoted by the Encyclopaedia Judaica, list 528 Jewish families among the 945 households of the town, and its congregations were formed by refugees from Spain, Portugal, Sicily and southern Italy. After the Venetian siege of 1688 most of the Jews left, and for more than a century and a half Vlorë had little or no Jewish life.

The building described in this entry is the one later sources call the old synagogue. According to JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project, Romaniote Jews from Ioannina and Preveza who settled in Valona from about 1850 identified the old synagogue, and the old cemetery was returned to them. Albanian writing on the town places it somewhere near the present centre of Vlorë. Its date of building, its founders and its appearance are not recorded in any source read. In 1934 a Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent heard that a large structure the Turks had used as a gunpowder store had burned during the World War and was believed to have been a synagogue. Encyclopaedia Judaica dates its destruction to the great fire of 1915. No photograph, drawing or plan of it has been found.

LOCATION

Where it stood

Historic: Valona (Avlona), near the town centre; street and plot unknown. Today: approximate, pin on Rruga e Çifutëve (Jewish Street), central Vlorë, 9401, Albania.

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The Jewish community

Jews were in Vlorë by the fifteenth century. Albanian historians quoted by albania360 differ on the start: Novruz Bajrami dates the first arrivals to 1430, Bardhosh Gaçe to about 1490. Approximately seventy families from Valencia are said to have come between 1391 and 1492, and after the expulsion from Spain the Ottoman state settled more exiles there. Four congregations existed side by side, Sephardi, Portuguese, Italian and Romaniote, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica says that all Ragusan consuls in Valona between 1541 and 1637 were Jews, who traded salt and pitch with Venice. Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon was invited from Italy in 1512 to unite the congregations but left after a dispute with the Spanish and Portuguese members; under the sage Moses Albelda they merged in the mid-seventeenth century. Most Jews fled to Berat during the Venetian siege of 1688. A new, small Romaniote community grew from about 1850 with settlers from Ioannina and Preveza. In 1934 it numbered about sixty people, and in 1938 there were fifteen Jewish families. Many lived on the street in the town centre now called Jewish Street.

Architecture and design

Almost nothing is known about the building. No photograph, engraving, plan or description of the old synagogue has been found, and no source gives its builder, date, size or materials. The only clue to its form is the 1934 report of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which speaks of a big structure that the Ottoman Turks had used as a gunpowder store and which local people believed had originally been a synagogue. If that identification is right, the building was large and solid enough to be used as a magazine, which suggests masonry walls, but this is an inference, not a documented fact. Whether it was one of the sixteenth-century congregational synagogues of the Sephardi, Portuguese, Italian or Romaniote congregations, or a later building, is unknown. The Jewish Street near the centre of Vlorë, where many Jewish families lived, has two- and three-storey houses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but no source places the synagogue on it.

Life inside the synagogue

No account of worship inside this building has been found. In the sixteenth century Vlorë had several congregations following the rites of their places of origin, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica records the efforts of Rabbi David Messer Leon, from 1512, to bring them under one leadership; which building or buildings they used is not stated. The community owned an ancient Torah scroll, called the Sefer Avilona and said to be 1,500 years old. The JTA correspondent in 1934 wrote that a very old scroll which had belonged to the Valona synagogue was kept by the community of Yanina (Ioannina), which refused to return it; Encyclopaedia Judaica says the scroll was later taken to Salonika and burned there by the Nazis. Whether the nineteenth-century Romaniote settlers used the old synagogue again after identifying it is not recorded. By 1934 the sixty Jews of Vlorë had no organised communal life, and one member put two rooms of his house at their disposal for prayers on festivals.

Destruction

The sources agree that the old synagogue was lost during the First World War but differ on the details. Italian forces occupied Vlorë during the war; JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project, followed by sephardicgenealogy.com, says that with the Italian occupation of Valona in 1915 the old synagogue became a military store and later burned in the great fire of central Valona. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry by Mordechai Arbell says simply that the old synagogue was destroyed by the great fire of 1915. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency report of April 1934 says the former Ottoman gunpowder store believed to have been a synagogue was destroyed by fire during the World War, without a year. Albanian writing on the town says only that it was destroyed in the First World War. No source names anyone who started the fire or says whether it was accidental, and the exact date of the great fire was not confirmed in any source read, so the year is given here as 1915-1918.

The community’s fate

The small Romaniote community that had settled in Vlorë after 1850 survived the loss of the old synagogue but lived without one. In 1934 it numbered about sixty people and met for festival prayers in two rooms of a member's house; in 1938 there were fifteen Jewish families. During the Second World War Albania was occupied first by Fascist Italy and from September 1943 by Nazi Germany. Encyclopaedia Judaica states that the Albanians hid and protected the Jews of Valona and the Jewish refugees who reached the town, saving nearly all of them, and local researcher Fari Shaska, quoted by albania360, says that local institutions did not cooperate with the German occupiers. After the war the Jews lived under the Communist regime. In 1991, when Albania opened its borders, almost all of Valona's Jews emigrated to Israel.

The site today

The exact site of the old synagogue is not known; Albanian writing says only that it stood somewhere near the present centre of Vlorë and that no trace of it remains. The street where many Jewish families lived, about 46 metres long and lined with two- and three-storey houses of around 1900, has been declared a cultural monument and is named Jewish Street (Rruga e Çifutëve). The old Jewish cemetery has been destroyed and only a few old gravestones can be identified. A later building of 1928 near the Muradie Mosque, which jguideeurope describes as having served as a synagogue, is a different building and is not covered here. The map pin marks Jewish Street as an approximation of the old Jewish quarter.

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