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Besides the establishments essential to any Jewish quarter, such as the butcher’s, the fishmonger’s, and the bakery, the Gerona call also contained a hospital, an orphanage and a charity institution. It also had at least three synagogues. The first stood between the Cathedral and the Episcopal Palace, and was abandoned when the community moved to a new location. The second, dating from the 13th century, is at 23, Calle de la Força, opposite today’s steps up to the Virgin of La Pera. The third stood in the Calle de Sant Llorenç, and had baths, a school for women, and a hospital. Today, it is the Bonastruc ça Porta Centre, and houses the Catalonian Museum on the History of the Jews and the Nahmánides Institute of Studies, named in honour of Mossé ben Nahman (Bonastruc ça Porta, in Catalan), who was a philosopher, exegete, poet, physician, leading Cabbalist and one of the great figures of Catalonian Medieval history. The museum contains, along with many other pieces, a splendid collection of tombstones from the nearby Hebrew cemetery of Montjuïc, dating from between the 12th and 15th centuries. The Main Historical Archives hold a valuable series of fragmented documents with Hebrew writing on them that were found in the sleeve of some 14th and 15th-century notary’s books.
The Municipal Archives contain a treasure: a collection of ninety, 12th-14th-century Hebrew documents, which are a valuable testimony of the cultural life of the Jewish community in Gerona.
The increase in population as from the 12th century meant that the area inhabited by the Jewish community was moved to a lower part of the city, although many Jews continued to own houses in different parts of the city. Then came the municipal order of 1448, which definitively turned the Jewish quarter into a ghetto. Before it was declared a “forbidden area” to Jews, at the end of the 14th century, the Calle de la Força - the old Via Augusta that ran through the city from north to south - had been the backbone of the aljama. Later, the centre of the Jewry moved to Call de Sant Llorenç, where a new synagoguye was built, and where the Casa Colls stands - a building that used to be the home of Lleó Avinay, the last leader of Gerona's Jewish quarter.
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