Synagogue de Nice

Not far from the Basilica of Notre-Dame, in central Nice, a stone façade rises with a large rose window above its entrance. That is the Synagogue de Nice, built in 1885 and dedicated in 1886 to a Byzantine design by Paul Martin. Inside, an Orthodox congregation follows the Ashkenazi rite. In April 2004, France placed the building on the monument historique list.

The community behind these walls reaches back to the fourteenth century, when Nice's records first mention Jewish residents. Their standing shifted with every ruler, hardening into a ghetto under the Sardinian king Victor Amédée in the early eighteenth century. In 1733 the community won leave to pray on the third floor of a Pénitents Noirs building. A mikveh, a ritual bath, sat in the cellar beneath. Money from that property's later sale helped raise the synagogue you see now. Nazi forces occupied the city in 1943 and deported about five thousand Jews over five months. Afterwards, arrivals from North Africa lifted the Jewish population to about twenty thousand, a number that later slipped below ten thousand. Two smaller places of worship share the city, on rue Blacas and on rue Alexis.

The stained glass holds a later chapter of its own. A major restoration finished in 1988, and windows depicting biblical scenes followed in 1993. Old stone and young glass share the same walls, and prayer continues inside.