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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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Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing
(JTA) — President Donald Trump’s pick for general counsel of the agency that oversees federal workers’ labor rights testified in Congress on Wednesday that he does not believe a cartoon he published in college that depicted a Jewish student with devil horns was antisemitic.
Charlton Allen appeared at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for his confirmation hearing Wednesday afternoon. There, Sen. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrat, pressed him about the cartoon.
“If you look behind me, you’ll see the front cover of an edition of the Carolina Review depicting Aaron Nelson, a Jewish candidate for student body president. Your magazine altered Nelson’s photo depicting him with the horns and a pitchfork. Inside the article says, ‘The difference between Aaron Nelson is simple. He’s Jewish.’” Gallego said. “Yes or no, Mr. Nelson. Do you stand by this depiction?”
The cartoon ignited a firestorm when it was published in the Carolina Review, a campus conservative magazine that Allen founded as an undergraduate at UNC. The magazine’s faculty advisor said he resigned after it went to print against his advice, and nearly two dozen Jewish faculty members pressed UNC’s chancellor to denounce the cartoon and censure the magazine, which he did.
Allen fended off allegations of antisemitism at the time and again during a 2014 hearing to confirm him for a position in North Carolina. He did so again on Tuesday.
“I would not say that it’s antisemitic,” he said. “We were the group that was calling for the equal treatment of all student religions.”
“If I were 30 years ago advocating for The Review, I would say, ‘don’t run that cover,’” he testified. “I think it was a mistake.”
According to reports from the time, Nelson had been accused by the Carolina Review of discriminating against a Christian campus group by voting not to fund it. He had voted in favor of funding a “majority” of other campus Christian groups while he was a representative in the student congress.
Facing backlash, Allen denied at the time that the depiction of Nelson with horns was meant to channel longstanding antisemitic stereotypes.
“Our cartoonist lampooned [Nelson] as such because her perception was that Aaron was evil,” Allen told the Duke Chronicle in April 1996. “Newspapers in the past few weeks have run cartoons lampooning public figures such as Gingrich, Pat Buchanan and even myself as ‘devils’ with horns and pitchforks. Where’s the public outcry over these cartoons?”
On Wednesday, Allen offered a slightly different explanation. He said the picture was meant to channel UNC’s historic and enduring rivalry with nearby Duke University, whose mascot is the “Blue Devil.”
“The cartoonist’s intention was to make an analogy to that,” he said.
In 2014, during his confirmation hearing ahead of his appointment for commissioner of the state Industrial Commission of North Carolina, Allen addressed criticisms of the cartoon by saying his grandfather had helped to liberate Jews in Europe from concentration camps during World War II, the Indy Week reported at the time.
Trump nominated Allen to the Office of the Special Council — the agency that protects whistleblowers from unlawful conduct — in May 2025 but withdrew the nomination less than a week later. In September, he nominated Allen to the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
Nelson, meanwhile, won the election handily to become UNC’s student body president. Now president of The Chamber, Chapel Hill’s chamber of commerce, Nelson did not respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment.
The post Trump nominee defends college cartoon of Jewish student with devil horns at Senate hearing appeared first on The Forward.
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Former antisemitic activist Lucas Gage explains to Jewish podcast why he left the movement
(JTA) — In July 2024, X suspended antisemitic influencer Lucas Gage for six months for making “repeated and clear calls for violence.”
This month, Gage was in Lakewood, New Jersey, explaining to two Jewish interviewers why he no longer considers himself an antisemite.
“It’s like a disease. I’m serious. It was like this compulsion and look, it comes from a justified place in some, but then it’s like what have I become honestly and it’s like I was sick of myself,” Gage told Yaakov Langer and Jake Turx on the podcast “Inspiration for the Nation.” “Looking back at the videos that got me knocked off of Twitter … I was out of my mind.”
Gage, a longtime white nationalist activist from New Jersey formerly known as Angelo John Gage, spent more than a decade promoting conspiracy theories and hate towards Jews online before publicly renouncing antisemitism earlier this year.
He told Langer and Turx that a pivotal moment for him was seeing antisemitic theories proliferate about the September murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. From there, his conversations changed.
“The more I sit down and talk to Jewish people, the more I realize how maligned they are,” Gage wrote in a post on X announcing the interview. “The lies the JQ crowd now tell about me are similar to those they tell about Jews. I was part of that crowd, but now I’m glad to say I’m no longer an antisemite.”
Gage announced in a March post on Substack that he was “abandoning” antisemitism, explaining that while his declaration was “not an apology,” his “focus on Jewish supremacy alone has become a self-destructive and futile endeavor, which does not even solve the problem.”
“The problem, however, is that I got sucked into the mob—the very mob I identified as ‘my people,’ who are just as problematic as the Jewish mob,” Gage wrote. “With that being said, I do not denounce my beliefs about Jewish supremacy and criminality in certain areas of society nor Jewish overrepresentation, which are all well substantiated.”
When asked by Langer, the founder of Living Lchaim and host of the podcast, why he had the “strength” to publicly renounce antisemitism and meet with Jews, Gage said he felt an obligation to engage with the Jewish community after spending years attacking it online.
Gage told the Jewish hosts that he thought it would be wrong for him “to walk away and not speak to a community I’ve been at war with for 14 years, and to see why I was at war with you guys in the first place.”
Turx, the senior White House correspondent for Mishpacha Magazine, an Orthodox publication, said the meeting took place after he reached out to Langer multiple times.
Langer did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment, and efforts to reach Gage were unsuccessful.
During the nearly two-hour interview, Gage recounted his journey from an Iraq war veteran to antisemitic activist and, more recently, to a public critic of the online movement he once helped build.
Gage, who is Roman Catholic, said his descent into antisemitic conspiracy theories began after serving in Kuwait and Iraq, when he became obsessed with identifying who was responsible for sending him to a war he described as “a lie.”
“I went through all the conspiracy theories until I ran into the Jews and that was in 2012 when I read ‘Mein Kampf’ and I was like ‘whoa,’” Gage said.
That year, Gage began posting on the racist Web forum Stormfront that he had recently found out about “the real Jewish question” and that “EVERYTHING connects and leads back to the jews — the evil jews,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Stormfront played a role in one of the best-known recent conversion-from-white supremacy stories, in which the child of the site’s founder renounced extremism and antisemitism after being invited to Shabbat dinners in college.
For Gage, Stormfront was a site of his radicalization. After beginning to post there, he became a regular fixture in white nationalist circles, appearing on far-right podcasts, organizing activists and eventually taking a shot at elected office.
In 2014, Gage ran unsuccessfully for the House in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District under the far-right white supremacist American Freedom Party but was disqualified before the campaign season began because of incorrectly filed paperwork. Following that bid, he served as the chairman of the National Youth Front, the youth wing of the party.
Gage’s online presence and influence within white nationalist circles grew rapidly, appearing alongside former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke and Stormfront founder Andrew Anglin on their platforms. He also frequently promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which is widely considered antisemitic and claims that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white people in Western countries with nonwhite immigrants.
Following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Gage said that he shifted the focus of his online accounts to railing against Israel, posting on X over the ensuing months that “every supporter of Israel is a terrorist” and that “Zionists are worse than pedophiles,” according to screenshots of his account posted by the Anti-Defamation League.
Gage said his departure from the movement was driven in part by frustration with what he called “low-IQ antisemitism,” or conspiracy theories that reflexively blame Jews for unrelated events.
“What was the final straw? Charlie Kirk. Okay. Why? Because I keep talking about low IQ antisemitism. What is that? It’s when you blame Jews for things they haven’t even done,” Gage said, explaining that he couldn’t agree with conspiratorial claims swirling on the far-right that Israel had been behind the Turning Point USA leader’s murder.
Gage said that he believed even if it was proven that the man accused of Kirk’s killing, Tyler Robinson, had committed the crime, the far-right crowd he had surrounded himself with would have still blamed the Jews.
“There’s no hope for these people, and then they’re turning on me just for disagreeing,” Gage said.
Gage’s shift quickly earned him the ire of antisemitic influencers he had once aligned himself with, including far-right antisemitic media personalities Jake Shields and Stew Peters.
“Imagine if Lucas Gage had never existed. What a beautiful world it would be. The world would be a much better place if Lucas Gage did not exist in it,” Peters said during a podcast appearance with Shields last month. “I mean, that guy singlehandedly destroyed the most cohesive movement in modern history.”
Looking ahead, Gage stressed the importance of engaging with figures who hold antisemitic views, citing the deadly terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia in December.
“I want to talk to different groups of people and say, look, yeah, we have to sit down and have these conversations, because if we don’t, if we isolate the antisemites, ‘oh, they’re just maniacs, they’re jealous, we don’t care,’ they’re going to go crazy,” Gage said. “I didn’t, but someone else did. Remember the guy who shot up the beach in Australia?”
Since announcing the interview, Langer said that his inbox had been “flooded” with messages asking him if he believed Gage was sincere, to which he responded “100%.”
“I wish more people were as authentic and honest as he is,” Langer said. “While it wasn’t easy to make change in his life, he did it.”
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This year’s biggest World Cup upset came from its most Jew-ish team
Cape Verde, an island nation of about 530,000 people off the coast of Africa, shocked soccer fans around the globe by holding Spain without a goal in their debut World Cup match this week. But Carol Castiel saw it coming.
For the better part of four decades, Castiel has been working to document and preserve the island nation’s rich but little-known Sephardic heritage. And while there are no known practicing Jews in Cape Verde today, Castiel said connection to Jewish identity remains in the country and in its soccer team.
The proof, she said, was in the team’s first result.
Cape Verde’s stout defense — led by 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha’s seven saves — shut out the team FIFA ranked second-best in the world, and a country whose GDP is 600 times greater than its own. Cape Verde, ranked 67th, didn’t buckle as Spain fired shot after shot on the goal. The game ended in a 0-0 stalemate.
“In the face of hardship, they just keep going, and they find ways,” Castiel said. “They’re the underdog.”
But there was also a Jewish genealogical connection on the Cape Verde team sheet: Reserve forward Gilson Benchimol’s surname dates back some 150 years to Sephardic Jews on the island.
The 2026 World Cup’s biggest upset to date has put the spotlight on the 10-island archipelago about 350 miles west of Senegal. Castiel, an American Jew and ex-journalist who is obtaining citizenship in Cape Verde, is also hoping it brings attention to her effort to preserve Jewish memory there.
An island nation’s Jewish roots
Jewish life on Cape Verde dates back to the 16th century, when the Portuguese Inquisition caused Jewish converts to Christianity — known then as “New Christians” — to emigrate en masse from the Iberian peninsula. (The Portuguese Inquisition started a couple decades after the Spanish Inquisition.)
The islands were far from the center of the Inquisition, perhaps allowing some of the exiled to resume practicing Judaism in secret. They also offered New Christians the chance to pursue commercial opportunities in international trade. These New Christians lived under surveillance even in Cape Verde, though, and one of the islands had a Jewish ghetto in the 16th century.
That first wave of migrants eventually assimilated through marriage or out-migrated, and the archipelago’s Jewish footprint largely disappeared. Some historians suggest that last names on the island related to trees and animals, like Carvalho (oak) or Pinto (chick), hint at possible Jewish ancestry. (Some Sephardic Jews and conversos adopted or were assigned last names during the Inquisition.)
Cape Verde became a popular Jewish destination again in the second half of the 19th century, after the Inquisition ended. The territory was still a Portuguese colony with a powerful grip on transatlantic trade, and Jewish emigres — many from the northern Morocco city of Tetouan — found success in agriculture and international shipping.
“They were key to the economy in those days,” Castiel said.
Some of the primary exports from that era, like coffee and rum, continue today. (The islands were also a hub of slave trade, and historians believe New Christians were among the slave traders.)
Few in number and mostly male, the latter wave of Jewish immigrants also married out of the religion, Castiel said, and their descendants today are Catholic. But their Jewish surnames remain prevalent on the islands. Castiel said names like Cohen and Levy, as well as variations on common Sephardic names like Ohayon and Benchimol, show that “the blood of Jews is running through the veins of a lot of people there.”
Castiel said she did not believe the national team’s Benchimol — who plays professionally for the Russian club Akron Tolyatti — identifies as Jewish. (The Forward has reached out to the player for comment.)
Though the Cape Verdeans with common Jewish surnames don’t tend to identify as Jewish, many embrace their Jewish ancestry.
One of them is Jose Levy. His great-grandfather, Fortunato Levy, emigrated from Morocco in the late 19th century and started a business doing sea-transportation around the islands. His father worked for the Portuguese government until Cape Verde won independence in 1975.
Levy, who worked for the United Nations before retiring recently, said many Jewish Cape Verde families returned to Portugal after independence. But to this day, many of his friends in Praia — the Cape Verde capital, where he lives — have Jewish names.
“Neither me nor my father were directly exposed to Jewish religion,” Levy, 68, said in an interview. “But our grandparents and great-grandparents were proud Jews, and they made a great contribution to what Cape Verde is now.”
Historic preservation
There are no known synagogues on the islands — even historic ones — and Cape Verde is one of the rare places in the world without a Chabad. But there are at least four small Jewish cemeteries spread across three islands, Castiel said. Modeled after Moroccan cemeteries, each has white horizontal stones with inscriptions in Hebrew and Portuguese — but they were overgrown, eroding or otherwise disarrayed when Castiel first visited.
“In Judaism, the most important thing is to create burial grounds to rest the souls,” Castiel said. “In that regard, these Jews did that. It’s just that they couldn’t sustain it.”
The nonprofit she founded in 2007, the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project, aims to restore the sites and expand the documentation and of Jewish life on the island through research, oral history and tourism. In 2018, the nonprofit installed a series of plaques to commemorate the 19th-century Jewish settlers interred at the cemeteries.
According to Castiel, the nonprofit’s primary funder is Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, whose Jewish historic preservation efforts in Morocco — the ancestral homeland of many Cape Verde migrants — are well-documented. Levy sits on the board.
“We carry the last name, but the religion aspect was not transferred, so we are Catholic,” Levy said. “But we are very proud of our Jewish ancestors.”
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