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Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them.
CATANIA, Italy (JTA) — Rabbi Gilberto Ventura believes his synagogue has the most beautiful view in the world. Located in the tower of a century-old castle on the slopes of Mt. Etna in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania, the synagogue is wedged between a snow-capped volcano and the sun-kissed Mediterranean sea.
The 49-year-old Brazil-born rabbi also thinks his congregation is one of the most unique in the world. It’s made up mainly of Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forced to hide their religious practice and convert to Catholicism after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Before that infamous decree, Sicily was home to tens of thousands of Jews.
The synagogue, which was first inaugurated last fall, is the result of decades of grassroots efforts by those descendants in Catania to find each other and forge a sense of community that had been lacking for centuries.
Hiring a full-time rabbi was the last piece of the puzzle, and Ventura, who has a long history of working with communities of Bnei Anusim in Brazil, was a natural candidate. He arrived in Catania in January.
“I really believe that the future Judaism in the world, especially in some places like Italy and, of course, Brazil, is connected to the Bnei Anusim, and the need to embrace the Bnei Anusim,” Ventura said.
But in an ongoing point of frustration, the formal organization representing Italian Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), does not recognize them as Jews.
“In the case of Catania, this strange Jewish community hasn’t passed all the steps the law requires,” said Giulio Di Segni, the vice president of UCEI.
He was referring to the fact that the community did not seek UCEI’s permission before establishing themselves under the name “Jewish community of Catania.” Per Italian law, UCEI has a monopoly on acknowledging and establishing Jewish communal life in Italy — including authority over who can use the term “Jewish community of” in formal ways.
“UCEI can’t accept this because it is too easy,” he added. “We are not against their synagogue or their way of prayer, but they cannot use the name ‘Jewish community of Catania.’”
The rooftop of the Castello Leucatia, where the community meets, has a large menorah and a view of the Mediterranean. (David I. Klein)
Catania’s Jewish community members told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a variety of stories about their Jewish backgrounds. Some came from families that always outwardly identified as Jewish. Others identified the source of family traditions practiced by parents and grandparents who — as descendants of Jews who faced persecution for practicing Judaism — still felt the need to hide aspects of their Jewishness from the public eye.
In the midst of questions about their ancestry, the majority of the Jewish community members have undergone Orthodox conversions. But that hasn’t led to their acceptance.
Benito Triolo, president of the Catania Jewish community, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he first came to Judaism at the age of 40, thanks to the insight of a Jewish friend in Palermo, Sicily’s capital and most populous city. Working together, they established a Charter of Sicilian Jewry, which aimed to identify and highlight the Jewish heritage of neighborhoods across the island.
While working on that project, Triolo came closer to his own Jewish heritage, and after years of study, he completed an Orthodox conversion through a rabbi in Miami 25 years ago.
Another community member, who was born Alessandro Scuderi but today goes by the name of Yoram Nathan, first felt drawn to Judaism as a child watching news of the Six-Day War in 1967. At first, he was laughed at by other members of his family — except his grandmother, who happened to have a tradition of lighting eight candles in early winter and baking flat unleavened bread around Easter time.
Decades of study later, Scuderi also completed a formal conversion to Judaism before an Orthodox rabbinic court, or beit din.
Others had more straightforward backgrounds.
“I was born in a Jewish family,” said David Scibilia, the community’s secretary. “Frankly speaking, we were not hiding or deep in the shadows in this part of the country.”
Scibilia said that his father explained to him that he was a Jew as early as the age of four. Within their own home, they observed holidays and kept Shabbat — no easy task since Italian schools at the time of his childhood in the 1970s had class on Saturdays. He did not eat meat until he was an adult and was able to acquire kosher meat.
He said that his family had maintained their Jewish identity since the days of the Inquisition and married amongst a small group of other similar families.
“I was a Jew, but not part of any community,” Scibilia said. “Just my family was my community.”
An aerial view of the city of Catania shows the Mt. Etna volcano in the background, Jan. 28, 28, 2022. (Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
Scibilia explained that once he had a child of his own, he realized he did not want her to have the same lonely Jewish experience. But when he reached out to UCEI, he said he found the proverbial door to organized Jewish life shut. Earning membership in Jewish community organizations across Western Europe involves a strict vetting process, and many groups require applicants to prove their mothers’ Jewishness according to varying standards.
Scibilia’s experience was echoed by Jews outside of the community in Catania and across Italy’s south who talked to JTA — a feeling of neglect or rejection by UCEI for those who fall outside of the norms of Italian Judaism.
UCEI currently recognizes 19 Jewish communities across northern Italy and just one in the south, in Naples, which has jurisdiction over the rest of the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The organization recognizes around 28,000 Jews in total across the country.
Scibilia noted that despite his Jewish upbringing, he has multiple certificates of conversion from Orthodox rabbis. The first came from a beit din of American rabbis from who traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, to assess Scibilia and others like him in Sicily. His second comes from the conversion court of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is known for its exacting Orthodox standards.
Both were rejected by Italy’s own Orthodox rabbinate, and he was forced to stand before another rabbinic court in Italy.
“I have at this moment — don’t start to laugh — three documents that prove that I am a Jew, two Ketubah [marriage contracts] for my wedding, and so on, again and again and again,” Scibilia said.
Others’ experiences in the region have been even more fraught, he said.
“The problem in Italy, that if you try to study with any rabbi here, you can study for 20 years, maybe you can die even before you reach the end of the tunnel,” he said. “From my point of view, they are playing with the spirituality of these people.”
In a statement last year, UCEI called the the Catanians “a phantom ‘Jewish community’” and accused them of “misleading the local institutions and deluding believers and sympathizers into adhering to traditional religious rites, never actually recognized or authorized by the Italian rabbinical authority.”
“Between UCEI and the Italian republic is an agreement signed in ‘87,” Di Segni said. “This law means everything about Jewish communities in Italy is through the Union Jewish community in Italy (UCEI).”
Noemi Di Segni, shown in Rome in 2017, is president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. (Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images)
Triolo said he isn’t too concerned about UCEI’s recognition.
“Ours is a process of refounding old communities that existed as early as 200 and up to 1492,” Triolo said. “Our recognition is already in our history. At that time the UCEI did not exist. We were there and we simply returned!”
No one knows when Jews first arrived in Sicily, but the Talmud tells a story that claims Rabbi Akiva, a well-known early rabbinic sage, visited the island in the early second century and told of a small Jewish community in Syracuse. Some historians believe the Roman writer Caecilius Calactinus — who was born in a town near Messina in the first century B.C.E — to have been of Jewish origin.
All agree that over the course of history, Sicily’s Jews watched as the island was traded between Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and half a dozen other empires. The narrative has also long been that Jewish life there ended five centuries ago, under Spanish rule.
The Spanish empire’s Jews suffered the same fate as Jews from the Iberian peninsula, who would become known to the world as Sephardim when they were expelled in 1492.
The descendents of Spain — and Sicily — spread throughout the world, establishing communities in North Africa, throughout the Ottoman empire, in the Netherlands and ultimately the British Isles and North America, as it was believed that Judaism faded away in their homelands.
Catania’s Jews disagree, arguing that many Jews practiced their religion over the centuries, in secret.
Triolo and others in the community formally inaugurated their synagogue in October. It was furnished with Torah scrolls donated by the Ohev Sholom synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The synagogue is situated in the tower of the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. The building was granted to the community by the city’s municipality.
“So they had the people, they had a synagogue, but they needed somebody to teach,” Ventura said.
The community meets in the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. (David I. Klein)
Ventura, who is Orthodox, may be the island’s first permanent working rabbi in over 500 years, but it’s not his first time working with Bnei Anusim.
Back in his native Brazil, Ventura was the leader of the Synagogue Without Borders, an organization through which he served 15 communities in Brazil’s north that were made up of descendants of Jews who came with the first Portuguese colonists to South America and who ultimately had to hide their identity as the Inquisition spread to the New World.
His work there put him in conflict with Brazil’s Jewish establishment, too. But Ventura is unfazed.
In Brazil, he founded synagogues and summer camps and built mikvahs and yeshivas across the country’s north. Since 2015, he has facilitated the conversion of hundreds of Bnei Anusim, bringing them back into the fold of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.
“I am a teacher since I was 21 years old,” he said. “Now I am 49, along with my wife. It’s one of the things we love to do, and know how to do. To teach Jewish philosophy, to teach Torah, to teach Tanakh, to teach the story of the Jews in Brazil, and now we are starting to teach the story of the Jews in Italy, the story of the Inquisition etcetera.”
In Castello Leucatia, he leads Shabbat services with the energy of a gospel preacher, pausing between prayers to explain a verse, teach a new tune, welcome latecomers, or simply to allow the congregation to talk.
Catania community members are shown at a recent gathering. (David I. Klein)
“This is what’s most important,” he remarked during one such lull on a recent Friday night. “That they get to talk and be a community.”
Ventura had organized a Shabbat event for other Jews across Italy — from Naples to Turin — who shared his belief that the future of Judaism was in communities like the one in Catania.
“Our point of view of Judaism is that we have to be a part of society, we don’t have to insulate ourselves, we believe that Judaism has a lot to contribute to society,” Ventura said. “In Brazil, we have a lot of connections with people from the periphery, in the favela and other communities, immigrants, Indians, etcetera. So that is something we want to establish here, to teach the people a Judaism that brings good things to the wider society.”
Ventura isn’t the only one working with such communities in southern Italy. Across the Strait of Messina, Jewish life has also been on the rise in Calabria — the toe of Italy’s boot — thanks to an American-born rabbi named Barbara Aiello.
Aiello, though raised in Pittsburgh, is of Calabrian descent. She returned to the land of her ancestors in the early 2000s and began working with the Bnei Anusim there, ultimately establishing a synagogue called Ner Tamid del Sud, meaning “eternal light of the south.”
“Until now, nobody took care of Judaism in the south of Italy,” Scibilia said while looking out at the Mediterranean from the terrace of Castello Leucatia.
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The post Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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UN’s Francesca Albanese Lashes Out at ‘Pro-Genocide Minions’ After Georgetown University Severs Ties
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for Palestinian human rights, on Nov. 14, 2023. Photo: AAPIMAGE via Reuters Connect
A controversial United Nations official who has been criticized for using her role to promote anti-Israel bias and pro-Hamas propaganda denied on Monday that Georgetown University severed its relationship with her due to accusations that she is antisemitic, explaining that she was dropped due to the US government’s decision to sanction her.
“I had an affiliation with a US university. I used to lecture there. Everything has been cut down,” she said earlier this month at an event with ODI Global.
A university official confirmed to JNS on Friday that Georgetown severed ties with Albanese due to the imposition of sanctions, saying, “US institutions are prohibited by federal law from affiliating with individuals subject to US sanctions.”
In July, the Trump administration sanctioned Albanese, accusing her of “political and economic warfare” against the US and Israel. “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the time.
Following news of Georgetown’s severing ties with Albanese, some media reports suggested the decision was based on her antisemitic comments. The UN official appeared to respond to such claims on the social media platform X.
“Georgetown’s decision to end my 10-year-old affiliation is yet another fallout of the sanctions the US imposed on me last July for exposing Israel’s genocide and the complicity of US businesses. Any other explanation is the usual laughable propaganda of the pro-genocide minions,” she posted on X.
Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has an extensive history of using her role at the UN to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s attacks on the Jewish state.
In August, she defended Hamas as a legitimate “political force” in Gaza that has built schools and hospitals while ruling the Palestinian enclave for nearly two decades, arguing that people should not think of the internationally designated terrorist group as armed “cut-throats” or “fighters.”
Months earlier, Albanese called on all medical professionals to cut ties with Israel, accusing the Jewish state of committing “genocide” — an accusation she made repeatedly since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
The UN recently launched a probe into Albanese’s conduct over allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations.
While speaking at a Washington, DC bookstore last October, Albanese also accused Israel of weaponizing the fallout of the Oct. 7 atrocities to justify the continued “colonization” of Gaza.
Albanese claimed last year that Israelis were “colonialists” who had “fake identities.” Previously, she defended Palestinians’ “right to resist” Israeli “occupation” at a time when over 1,100 rockets were fired by Gaza terrorists at Israel. In 2023, US lawmakers called for the firing of Albanese for what they described as her “outrageous” antisemitic statements, including a 2014 letter in which she claimed America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”
Albanese’s anti-Israel comments have earned her the praise of Hamas officials in the past.
In response to French President Emmanuel Macron’s calling Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel the “largest antisemitic massacre of the 21st century,” Albanese said, “No, Mr. Macron. The victims of Oct. 7 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression.”
Video footage of the Oct. 7 onslaught showed Palestinian terrorists led by Hamas celebrating the fact that they were murdering Jews.
Nevertheless, Albanese has argued that Israel should make peace with Hamas, saying that it “needs to make peace with Hamas in order to not be threatened by Hamas.” In July 2024, she also called for Israel to be expelled from the UN.
Albanese even once confessed that she struggles with impartiality. In an interview with the Institute for Palestine Studies in which she discussed Palestinian refugees and the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) she said, “I feared deep down perhaps I feared that embarking on research on a matter on which I deeply held personal views could compromise my objectivity.”
UN Watch cheered Albanese’s dismissal from Georgetown as a victory against rising antisemitism.
“We welcome Georgetown University’s decision,” UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said in a statement. “Academic institutions have a responsibility to uphold basic standards of integrity and human dignity. Removing an official who has repeatedly trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric and justified terrorism is a necessary step toward restoring those standards.”
Calling on the UN to join Georgetown in dismissing Albanese, he added, “This sends an important message. Positions of authority at the United Nations do not grant immunity from accountability, and universities should not serve as safe havens for those who abuse their platforms to promote hatred. The UN must follow Georgetown’s lead and remove Albanese.”
Albanese is not without allies at Georgetown. One of them, Middle East studies associate professor Nader Hashemi, said on X that Albanese’s status as a sanctioned person will change if and when the Democrats win the US presidency and that she will be hosted at Georgetown again.
“As soon as the sanctions are lifted on Francesca, we plan to host a [sic] her again at Georgetown University,” he wrote. “I’m certain her affiliation will also be restored. When she does return to campus, I suspect there is not a room large enough to accommodate all the people who want to meet her.”
Hatred for Israel, often fueled by the spread of misinformation about the Jewish state’s history and conduct in Gaza, is fueling violence against Jews in the US and elsewhere, according to experts who spoke with The Algemeiner earlier this year.
In June, an assailant firebombed a pro-Israel rally with Molotov cocktails and a “makeshift” flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado, killing one person and injuring 13 in what US authorities called a targeted terrorist attack. According to court documents, the man charged for the attack yelled “Free Palestine” during the violence and also told investigators that he wanted to “kill all Zionist people.”
The Colorado firebombing came less than two weeks after a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted by the American Jewish Committee. The suspect charged for the double murder also yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supported the criminal charges against the suspect stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
Recent research has found that anti-Zionist faculty at universities have created a hostile climate for Jews and Israelis.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), university faculty and staff have exacerbated the antisemitism crisis by politicizing the classroom, promoting anti-Israel bias, and even discriminating against Jewish colleagues.
The actions by faculty provided an academic pretext for the relentless wave of antisemitic incidents of discrimination and harassment which pro-Hamas activists have perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli members of campus communities since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, according to the survey, released in September.
The survey of “Jewish-identifying US-based faculty members” found that 73 percent of Jewish faculty witnessed their colleagues engaging in antisemitic activity, and a significant percentage named the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) group as the force driving it. Of those aware of an FSJP chapter on their campus, the vast majority of respondents reported that the chapter engaged in anti-Israel programming (77.2 percent), organized anti-Israel protests and demonstrations (79.4 percent), and endorsed anti-Israel divestment campaigns (84.8 percent).
Additionally, 50 percent of respondents said that anti-Zionist faculty have established de facto, or “shadow,” boycotts of Israel on campus even in the absence of formal declaration or recognition of one by the administration. Among those who reported the presence of such a boycott, 55 percent noted that departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent said this policy is also subtly enacted by sabotaging negotiations for partnerships with Israeli institutions. All the while, such faculty fostered an environment in which Jewish professors were “maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed” as they assumed the right to determine for their Jewish colleagues what constitutes antisemitism.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Russian Teen Assaulted Over Israeli Flag Photo as Antisemitism Concerns Mount, Amid Calls for Jews to Leave Country
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, former chief rabbi of Moscow and current president of the Conference of European Rabbis, on June 24, 2024. Photo: IMAGO/epd via Reuters Connect
A 15-year-old student at a school in Russia was brutally assaulted by classmates after posting a photo featuring an Israeli flag on social media, Russian media reported, leaving him with a serious eye fracture from an incident that has drawn public outrage and is now under criminal investigation.
Earlier this month, a high school student in St. Petersburg, a major city in northwestern Russia, was physically attacked by two classmates after changing his social media profile photo to one featuring an Israeli flag, according to a report by local News Channel 78 on Sunday.
One of the attackers allegedly harassed the boy over his profile picture, demanding that he remove it and apologize.
After a verbal confrontation in which the attacker threatened the boy and hurled insults, including references to the Holocaust, he allegedly demanded that the victim meet him in the bathroom to continue the discussion.
When the two boys met there, the assailant reportedly demanded that he apologize on his knees. The victim refused but said he was willing to apologize without being humiliated.
The attacker then struck him repeatedly in the face while another boy blocked the bathroom exit.
The victim had to be hospitalized after suffering a fracture to the eye socket and underwent surgery under general anesthesia to remove bone fragments.
After spending more than a week in the hospital, he is now receiving outpatient care, and his family is coordinating with school administrators on a transition to home-based schooling as recommended by his doctors.
The boy’s mother reported the assault to the police, prompting local authorities to open a criminal investigation for assault and battery.
This incident came after Pinchas Goldschmidt, who served as Moscow’s chief rabbi from 1993 to 2022, recently urged Jews to leave Russia and consider immigrating to Israel, citing a growing hostile climate and rising antisemitic attacks targeting the local Jewish community.
“I have long urged Russia’s Jews to consider aliyah, the return to Israel. The post-Soviet renaissance was extraordinary, but illusions of permanence ignore history,” Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, wrote in an op-ed for The Jerusalem Post earlier this month.
“Now, more than ever, Russia’s Jews should heed the call to leave. Israel offers not just refuge but a homeland where Jewish life is sovereign, not contingent on geopolitical whims,” he continued.
Although the number of Jews leaving Russia has declined, the country still accounted for the largest number of immigrants to Israel in 2025, with roughly 8,300 arrivals, according to data released Monday by Israel’s Immigration and Absorption Ministry.
This figure marked a nearly 60 percent drop from 19,500 last year and a small fraction of the 74,000 who immigrated in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Israel suspends operations of multiple humanitarian organizations in Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders
The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is halting the operations of more than three dozen humanitarian groups in Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders.
The ministry announced on Tuesday that the affected organizations failed to meet its new requirements for non-governmental organizations providing humanitarian aid in Gaza, which were posted online in November. The requirements included providing a full list of its Palestinian employees.
“We emphasize that the registration process is intended to prevent the exploitation of aid by Hamas, which in the past operated under the cover of certain international aid organizations, knowingly or unknowingly,” wrote the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which oversees aid in Gaza, in a post on X.
The ministry said that 37 of the NGOs working in Gaza did not have their permits renewed for the coming year, according to the Associated Press.
Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, posted a link to a Ynet article about the suspensions on X Tuesday, writing, “An ongoing scandal ignored by UN & European enablers shows why @Israel has to decertify some of the NGOs who have terrorists on their payroll.”
The suspensions, which will begin on Jan. 1, come as President Donald Trump has put pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to usher the U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel into its second phase, which would include the reconstruction of Gaza.
Speaking beside Netanyahu at a press conference Monday, Trump said that he believed reconstruction efforts in the enclave were “going to begin pretty soon,” adding that work to improve sanitary conditions had already begun.
But aid groups in Gaza have said that Israel has continued to block aid from entering the enclave as storms and flooding have battered the region’s residents in recent weeks.
Earlier this month, Doctors Without Borders warned in a blog post that Israel’s new registration guidelines “risk leaving hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza without lifesaving healthcare in 2026.” The United Nations’ Humanitarian Country Team also lambasted the requirements, writing that aid groups had warned they were “vague, politicised and impossible to meet without breaching humanitarian principles.”
But COGAT minimized the impact of the suspensions in its post, writing that “the implementation of the government decision will not result in any future harm to the volume of humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip.” It said that the combined contributions of the groups affected amounted to 1% of the total aid volume in Gaza.
In June 2024, Israel accused Doctors Without Borders, which is also known by its French acronym MSF, of employing a Hamas operative. In response, MSF said it was “deeply concerned by these allegations and is taking them very seriously.”
“MSF chose not to cooperate with the registration process and refused to provide Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs with a list of its employees, as required by a government decision,” the post continued.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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