Not only was the building of the synagogue of Trieste changed into a warehouse, but its most common furnishings were also put to new, different uses. The seats of the gallery are one example. Between June and July 1944, 102 chairs were sold to an SS leisure club (SS Kurt Eggers Kommando Adria) that had been set up in the Gymnasium-Lyceum Dante Alighieri as a cinema for the troops. In early September 1944 another thirty seats were sold to a cinema in Padua.

Women's galleries of the synagogue Source: Il nuovo Tempio Israelitico di Trieste, supplement to the “Corriere israelitico”, Udine, 1912 (photograph by Pietro Opiglia)

“From the gallery the Germans removed the seats and transported them to a cinema” (photograph taken after the Liberation, 15 May 1945) © Courtesy of Comunità Ebraica di Trieste

There is a great deal of documentation attesting to the reuse or below-value sale of all the objects owned by the Jewish community. Desks, typing-machines, cupboards, tables, chests of drawers and similar objects that had formerly furnished the buildings of the Jewish community were used to equip Nazi offices in February 1944. Papers from the current archives were sold to junk dealers from June to September 1944. Still, on 1 March 1945, the Supreme Commissioner asked court expert Marcello Spagnul to appraise the contents of a chest found in the synagogue. Spagnul had previously been called in to appraise assets belonging to Jewish emigrants that were stored at the Free Port of Trieste. On this occasion he found that the objects – Jewish rite garments, scroll covers in silk and velvet, embroidered textiles, a crown with an inscription, funeral vestments, etc. – were too worn and damaged to have any commercial value and could “only have value if a person is found who is interested in them”.