The Italian city of Gorizia used to have a thriving Jewish community. During the Second World War most of its members perished or fled, and when the war ended the synagogue and the cemetery were on different sides of the Iron Curtain. They are now being reconnected at a symbolic level.

A cross-border walk down the memory lane from the synagogue in Gorizia to the Jewish cemetery on the Slovenian side of the border now connects the two main monuments of Jewish culture in the area, thanks to Nova Gorica and Gorizia holding the title of the 2025 European Capital of Culture.

"We felt it was important that when Nova Gorica and Gorizia are a single European Capital of Culture we take a look at the former Jewish community in Gorizia," historian Renato Podbersič told the Slovenian Press Agency about the reasons for the Little Jerusalem project.

Every first Sunday from April to November, there are guided tours starting at the synagogue in Ascoli Street in the former Jewish ghetto.

Visitors are taken around various former homes and memorials to important Jews in Gorizia, to the walk's endpoint in the Jewish cemetery, the largest in Slovenia. It was used between the 17th century and the end of WWII. Around 900 people are buried there.

A book guide to the memory trail will be published in May, first in Slovenian and Italian, and then in English and German.

Written by Podbersič and Lorenzo Drascek, head of a Jewish association from Gorizia, the book will bring an insight into the history of Jews in Gorizia, where they were first mentioned in written records in 1288.

Few remains of Jewish community

The community, decimated in the Holocaust, was formally disbanded in 1969, when it joined the larger Trieste Jewish community.

Although the Jewish community in Gorizia was never sizeable, it played a very important role in the city's business, culture and social life, according to Podbersič.

"They were successful businessmen, service workers, city administration, professors, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists and architects.

"That is why 'Jerusalem on the Isonzo' was used to describe Gorizia as the home town of Gorizia Jews at the end of the 19th century," said Podbersič, who has written extensively about the Jewish community there. Hence the project title Little Jerusalem.

Some of the most prominent members of the community were linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829-1907) and journalist Carolina Coen Luzzatto (1837-1919).

An interesting family with ties to Maribor were the Morpurgos, who came to Gorizia after Jews were expelled from the historical provinces of Styria and Carinthia at the end of the 15th century.

The region, at the crossroads of languages and cultures, had always been more open than many other parts of Europe, and Podbersič says that the persecution of Jews under Fascists was not nearly as harsh as it became when the Nazis took over.

The final blow to the community's demise thus came after Italy's capitulation in September 1943: on 23 November 1943 the Nazis rounded up the remaining Jews in Gorizia, those who had not yet escaped before, to concentration camps. Only two returned and both of them eventually emigrated.