Synagogue and kosher restaurant for prominent Sliema location

The former post office building in Manoel Dimech Street in Sliema, opposite the police station, has been earmarked for the development of a synagogue, a restaurant and classrooms for religious instruction.

The Chabad Malta Foundation said the project was the “first Jewish centre on the island of Malta after more than 2,000 years of Jewish presence in the history of Malta”.

The plan is to build a Jewish centre which will cater for the needs of the community as well as visiting tourists, and will include a kosher restaurant on the ground floor.

The proposal involves the partial demolition of the existing building whose façade will be retained and restored, the construction of rooms at the back part of property and the construction of two additional floors.

As proposed the new building will have the same height of the adjacent residential blocks on its left.

The planning application was presented by Rabbi Chaim on behalf of the  Chabad Malta Foundation Segal.

Currently, two inconspicuous synagogues are active in Malta, located in ordinary residential buildings in St Julian’s and another in Ta’ Xbiex.

Malta’s Jewish Community numbers just 250 members although numbers could be greater especially among migrant communities and tourists and businessmen who visit the increasingly cosmopolitan island.

The Jews in Malta

Malta boasts an interesting Jewish history dating back to antiquity. One of the most important Jewish scholars and mystics, Rabbi Abraham Shmuel Abulafia, spent the last years of his life in Comino about 750 years ago.

On this island he wrote two books (out of 50 books) – “Imrey Shefer” and “Gan Na’ul”. When he lived in Sicily he developed and refined a trend of Kabbalah, giving it the name “prophetic stream”.

In 2003 the presumed remains of Abulafia and of other Jewish Maltese of the 1st Century were symbolically reburied in the Jewish Cemetery, Marsa.

The chronicles of Gilibertus Abbate in 1245 report that 25 Jewish families lived in Malta and eight in Gozo. In Mdina, during medieval times, the street along the north side of the cathedral (today’s Triq il-Fosos) was designated as the Jewish quarter. But in 1492, the Edict of Expulsion forced all Jews to leave the lands under the Spanish crown – including Malta.

Under the Knights of St John, the Jewish population was mainly composed of slaves captured in piracy raids, at a time when Jews were given sanctuary in Ottoman lands, following their persecution and expulsion from Spanish lands.

In 1749, the baptised Jewish slave Giuseppe Antonio Cohen, revealed to the authorities a plot of a Muslim slave revolt. For his deed, he was granted a pension of 500 scudi and the ownership of a building in Strada Mercanti, Valletta.

The majority of the contemporary Maltese Jewish community originates in Jewish immigration from the United Kingdom, the Maghreb and Turkey under British rule.

In the 1930s the Jewish community in Malta welcomed refugees from Italy and Central Europe escaping Nazi rule.

Maltese Jews found themselves without a synagogue when the building in Spur Street, opposite Lower St Elmo Gate, was demolished in 1979 as part of a slum clearance and road widening scheme.

The community remained without a Synagogue until 1984 when a new Synagogue was inaugurated in Strada San Ursola. This served the Jewish Community until 1995, when a bulldozer working on an adjacent building site undermined the foundations, causing the building containing the Synagogue to collapse.

In 2000, thanks to donations from the United States and the United Kingdom, a flat in Ta’ Xbiex was converted into a Jewish Centre and Synagogue.

In 2013 Rabbi Chaim Shalom and Rabbi Haya Moshka Segal founded the Chabad Jewish Centre in Borg Olivier Street in St Julian’s, which includes the L’Chaim kosher restaurant.