Several years ago, for our Jewish friends in Perth, we prepared an article on Split’s Synagogue, which is the world’s second oldest Sephardic synagogue still operational.

The world’s oldest Sephardic synagogue (and Europe’s second oldest synagogue after Prague’s) is just down the road in Dubrovnik.

How did Dubrovnik end up with this monument?

In 1492, in the same month he sent Columbus off to the New World, the king of Spain, Ferdinand II, expelled 200,000 Jews from his country. The fleeing Sephardim (Sefarad being Hebrew for Spain) headed east, as they had heard the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Bajazet II, was more than happy to accept them. “How can you call Ferdinand II a wise king, the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?”

Of those that survived the expulsion, some decided not to travel the whole way to Asia Minor, and instead joined with a small number of existing Jews to form a strong community in Dubrovnik.

Putting aside their Antisemitism for the sake of business pragmatism, the elders of the mercantile city of Dubrovnik allowed the Jews to settle inside the city walls in 1546, and build a temple (in a 13th Century house). Since then, through good and extremely bad times (various persecutions directed by various rulers), the community has remained on Zudioska Ulica (the Jewish Street).

During the last war the synagogue was damaged – as were the buildings containing places of worship for all faiths; Catholic, Orthodox, Islamic and Jewish – that vandalism didn’t discriminate. Renovations were completed in 1997.

(The picture which looks like a air-conditioning vent is a screen which women had to sit behind – until the 19th Century when a balcony was built for them.)

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