In 1620, Rachel Olivetti – the daughter of an aristocratic Italian Jewish family – married her fiancé Judah Leone from the famous Montefiore line. Before the couple got married, Olivetti decided to make a gift for her fiance’s family: an ornate, hand-embroidered parochet (Torah ark curtain) made of fine fabrics in dark red and gold.

But Olivetti’s gesture didn’t end there. In a feminist act that was almost unthinkable at the time, she sewed a poem that proudly ran the length of the parochet and praised marriage as “an important day for the Montefiores” because she, Rachel from the Olivetti- Clan whose family entered their home.