Following its separation from the Sephardic community, the Italian-Jewish community of Istanbul established the Italian Synagogue in the late 1880s.
The oldest of Istanbul’s sixteen active synagogues, Ahrida dates back to the early 1400s. Due to a fire, it was terribly damaged in the
Towards the end of the 1930s, the Jewish populations of Pera and Galata had increased so much that the need for a new synagogue became vital.