New photos from the ghetto

It’s a warm morning in the Venice Ghetto. A street cleaner is sweeping the main piazza, Campo di Ghetto Nuovo, where photographer Judy Goldhill is staying at a fifteenth century guesthouse.

Not that she has slept much –  Goldhill been up for much of the night, creating images for an exhibition that opened this week at Visioni Altre gallery on the other side of the square, right next to the Chabad centre where women in long skirts and men in white shirts enthusiastically welcome in Shabbat week in, week out.

In addition to its blossoming Lubavitch community, the ghetto, established by the Venetian Senate in 1516, has five ornate synagogues built between between 1528 and the mid-seventeenth century: the German synagogue, Schola Francese (built by Jews from the South of France), the Italian synagogue, the Levantine and the Spanish synagogue. They are all on the upper floors of buildings because Venetian authorities required Jewish places of worship to be inconspicuous. And while they might, looking up, appear to form a cohesive whole, they were not. Cohabiting in such a tightly packed space with people whose traditions, customs and ways of worship were not your own must have brought some cacophonous and claustrophobic challenges. 

Goldhill’s work depicts the dense, layered architecture of Europe’s first ghetto in tension with the sky. “I was trying to express the confinement of the ghetto.”