MEIS

Via Piangipane, 81 | Ferrara

The National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah - MEIS recounts the over two thousand years of Jewish experience in Italy, letting us know about life, thought and essencial contributions to history and Country's culture, with special attention to the persecution's period and Shoah.

MEIS is a place where everyone is welcomed, a laboratory for ideas and reflections on what it means to be a minority, encouraging the debate on Judaism, its future in Italy and the value of dialogue between cultures.

The final arrangement, scheduled for 2020, will include: public reception, exhibition areas, the MEIShop, a library, archive and documents and cataloguing center, a restaurant, an auditorium, educational laboratories and offices.

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From the 10th of January 2022 museum access only for Super Green Pass owners

ONGOING EVENTS:

Jews, an italian story - PERMANENT EXHIBITION
The exhibition itinerary regards the most important topics from Middle Age to Renaissance, which describe the permanent narration. With "Jews, an italian story", MEIS illustrates the italian Judaism's experience, describing how it raised and developed from Roman Age Peninsula to Middle Age, and how it built its particular identity, compared to other diaspora's places, until Renaissance. Thanks to some specialists' videos, precious and rare artifacts, full immersion stops, multimedia files, recreations (Jerusalem's Temple, Tito's Arch, Ostia and Bova Marina's Jewish Synagogues), sounds and music, the itinerary identifies the origins and the diaspora's areas of the Jews, and recalls the exile's routes towards western Mediterranean Sea.
It shows their stability in Rome and South Italy, it talks about migration, slavery, integration and religous intolerance, compared with both pagan and christian world. It follows Judaism's flowering in South Italy during Middle Age, before their expulsion, and then the clarifing of an italian Jewish culture all over the Country. As an introduction to the museum's topics, the multimedia exhibition "Through the eyes of the italian Jews", edited by Giovanni Carrada e Simonetta Della Seta: 2200 years of history and italian culture in twenty-four minutes, seen and told with a Jewish perspective.

Beyond the ghetto. Inside&Outside - TEMPORARY EXHIBITION (from 29 October 2021 to 5 May 2022)
The exhibition, sponsored by the Culture Ministery, Emilia-Romagna Region, Ferrara Municipality, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities and the Jewish Community of Ferrara, has been realized thanks to the support of Intesa Sanpaolo, The David Berg Foundation, Guglielmo De Lèvy Foundation and TPER.
The exhibition reminisces the history of Italian jews from the first ghetto in Venice in 1516 to the start of the XX century. It treats crucial moments of modern history seen by the point of view of Jewish experience, built and told through heterogeneous materials and pieces coming from all over Italy and abroad. The peculiarity of this expositive project is the will of complete the tour with objects that testify the daily Jewish life, like the door of Aron Ha-Qodesh or the proofs of personal commitment.
The exhibition gives us a clear image of the identity turning points lived by the jews in Italy and Europe: they left the ghetto to actively participate in the National History, and then they were closed in again - with Fascism - in an "inside" of rights deprivation and horror.

Find out more

•   Jews, an Italian Story - PERMANENT EXHIBITION