 |
 |
||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||
The Museums / Entrance and Cloister
 Entrance and Cloister The anonymous entrance door on Vicolo Salomone Olper, leads to an entrance corridory with the Synagogue main door and to a cloister. The cloister opens to a small courtyard. The complex is built around this courtyard and it's used for exhibitions, ceremonies, cultural events. Three permanent pieces of art are located in the above places. Entrance: the Shoah Memorial.  The artist Antonio Recalcati offered this Art work to the Casale Community. It is dedicated to the Holocaust victims from Casale and Moncalvo.A list of the names of the victims is written on glass and, on beaten iron, are sculptured Hebrew words, as Shalom (peace), Shoah (catastrophe) and Midor LeDor (from generation to generation). This last inscription refers to the duty to perpetuate tradition and memory. The sculpture is fixed on the wall and its dimension is 3x3m. Visually it also recalls the Wailing Wall, in Jerusalem, the only part still remaining of the Holy Temple. Beyond its archeological value, the Wailing Wall is considered a central spiritual site for the Jewish people. Here million of visitors, Jews and Gentiles come to visit and pray. Many of them use to leave, into the stone cracks, small pieces of paper with prayers or personal wishes. These elements are also represented in the memorial, together with the Wailing Wall stones, to recall the Jewish faith and more Holocaust metaphorically related elements: the stones stands still, while the "papers" seems to fly from the wall to the sky. Cloister: the Hebrew Alphabet.  Created by the artist Gabriele Levy this sculptural exhibition's subject is the Hebrew alphabet. The work presents each of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Each letter is made of a 22x24 cm piece of clay. whose weight is about 2 Kg. A descriptive text is written next to each letter, illustrating the letter pronunciation, its numerical value (in Hebrew, “Ghematria”) and its symbolic meaning.  The Masters of the Talmud have explained the sense and the potential force of every letter which has many influences on the words and in particular on the Jewish names.A small book, in Italian and English can be purchased at the Bookshop: it contains an image of every letter and its related commentary. Other Art works based on Gabriele Levy's letters are shown in the stairs going to the Silvers’ Museum. This exhibition has been visited since 1994 by nearly 250.000 people.
 In the courtyard adjacent to the cloister, stands out a small pomegranate tree with a big meaning. according to the Jewish tradition, the pomegranate, for its uncountable seeds, symbolizes the prosperity and the life; for this reason it is used as a greeting at Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish New Year festival. The pomegranate is also one of the biblical seven vegetable species of the Land of Israel and is thus related with the ancient history of the Jewish people.This mystical meaning has captivated an artist in visit to the Jewish community of Casale, Jessica Carrol, specialized in art works concerning bees.  Recalling the motif of an ancient coin of a Jewish community of Maghreb, a six pointed star, the artist created six small bees in metal, representing a star. In fact the community which coined itself this money, abstracting thus from the surrounding world, is a symbol of how the Jewish communities persisted without changing in a world that is continuously transformed by new inventions, by trends, but also by wars and political events. Most of the nations' culture in the world changed trough the centuries, yet the Jewish tradition, religion and culture remained basically unchanged and strong. In the Jewish community of Casale, where a flourishing group of people left the place to a few Jewish inhabitants, the synagogue building -and its maintain during a long time- represents this tenacity of keeping alive the past traditions in an evolving world. On the ground, five bees are disposed as five of the six points of the star of the coin, “dancing” happily on their honey. The lacking point is a bee who has left the star to join the pomegranate and is resting one of its branches.The separate, leving the star, symbolizes a new force animating the Jewish communities, that is keeping solidly the ancestral tradition, yet also creating links with the exterior world, with vitality and prosperity. Back to the Top
|
|||||||||||||||||
