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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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Jonah Hill’s cancel culture dramedy makes an antisemitism exception — all about Kanye
Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, is having an interesting April.
Fans are hailing his new album Bully as a return to form. (Critics are more mixed.) He reportedly made $33 million from two sold-out shows in Los Angeles, but he was also banned from entering the U.K. owing to a pressure campaign by Jewish groups over a scheduled headlining performance at the Wired music festival, even as the artist, who recently attributed his antisemitic behavior to a brain injury and bipolar disorder, offered to have “meet and listen” sessions with the Jewish community.
On top of this mixed reception, add a movie premiere. Ye has a memorable cameo in Jonah Hill’s new AppleTV+ film The Outcome, about an A-list actor’s teshuvah tour. And that moment has something to say about what to do with the artist’s outbursts.
Hill’s character, a crass crisis lawyer named Ira, assembles a dream team to protect his client, Reef Hawk (Keanu Reeves), who is awaiting the release of an incriminating video. The nature of this video is unknown beyond its potential to derail his comeback after a five-year sabbatical to treat a secret heroin addiction. Among Reef’s potential defenders are a Gloria Allred-style lawyer (Laverne Cox), a Black minister legendary for his work on civil rights (Roy Wood Jr.) and an ambassador from the Asian-American community (Atsuko Okatsuka). Ira notes someone missing from the mix, one “Moshe, from the Antisemitism Committee,” perhaps a poorly-named stand-in for the ADL.
“We ran the numbers,” Ira’s assistant says by way of explanation. “It turns out that hating Jews doesn’t negatively affect a person’s career. In fact, it could help.”
And we cut to a black-and-white headshot of Ye, occupying the whole screen.
Hill explained this choice in an interview with TMZ, saying the scene wasn’t just there to score a cheap shot at Ye, who publicly (and compellingly) apologized in an ad in the Wall Street Journal in January.
“In the midst of all this Jew stuff, he did Instagram a picture of me in the 21 Jump Street poster,” Hill recalled. “And he said something along the lines of ‘I don’t hate Jews anymore because I love Jonah Hill.’”
“Me and him got no beef,” Hill continued.” I just put that in there like, ‘Yo, you’re gonna f—ing put the 21 Jump Street poster up there and say you don’t hate Jews anymore. That’s pretty wild. I’m gonna put a picture of you saying that like, hating Jews helps your career.’”
Clearly a sight gag and a bit of an inside joke. But is it true?
Running my own numbers, and not even accounting for this last week of ups and downs, Ye took a major hit to his net worth when he lost his Adidas partnership, backsliding all the way from billionaire to mere multimillionaire. Fans still turn up for Ye, and some even seem to like what I’ll call his Hitler catalogue. That said, it’s hard to imagine him making a full recovery, once again gracing the stage at the Grammys or headlining a major festival or getting a shot at the Super Bowl halftime show.
The difference between Ye’s transgression and that of others is instructive. There’s plenty of arguable antisemitism in the case of celebrities whose pro-Palestinian advocacy has crossed the line into something unsavory. Rappers Bob Vylan of “death, death to the IDF” fame and Kneecap, who chanted “up Hamas, up Hezbollah,” come to mind. They have had their own brushes with cancellation and been denied visas because of their antics — but also strong support from those who believe they are simply speaking up for Palestinians. The ascendancy of Israel conspiracies, echoing age old canards, has recently produced an odd coalition between pundits on the far-left and far-right, and hasn’t put a dent in their audience.
(Hill, though Jewish, was accused of dabbling in Jewish stereotypes his last film, You People, and he will likely get some flack for this movie, both for his character — a kind of grubby fixer who calls his client “Bubbie” — and for a joke where Man’s Search for Meaning is referred to as “the most lit Holocaust book.”)
Even in this environment, Ye is toxic for mainstream consumption, because when he went “death con 3” on the Jews, his words had no agenda beyond delusion-fueled animus about Jewish control of the media. Ye’s awareness of the Middle East was best expressed on the occasion he used a fish tank net and Yoo-hoo bottle to represent the Israeli prime minister. Vylan and Kneecap’s slogans are more subtle and plausibly deniable than one of Ye’s latest tracks, literally called “Heil Hitler.”
There was no hedging it, try as Candace Owens might. It was Jew Hate Classic, the original recipe. And it wasn’t, in the case of Mel Gibson, a pattern that emerged over relatively wide gaps of time with only one incident widely known to the general public. It was an endless, often marathon torrent of invective and odd tangents care of an unmedicated bipolar insomniac. It went on for months. Then died off. Then came back swinging in the form of an album the concept of which could, charitably, be defined as spiritually Hitlerian.
The sheer concentration of vitriol seems like proof that the outburst was the result of a manic episode, which could afford the rapper some grace. Instead, he now lives in a liminal space between relevance and punchline. This strain of antisemitism doesn’t boost careers — yet — but the man behind it can sell out stadiums in spite of it.
All the while, the question of what to do with Ye’s mental health, and how it factors into his cancellation makes him a conundrum, even if it should by rights be a better excuse than Mel Gibson’s squad car in vino veritas. (Gibson is mentioned in the film, in the context of a poppers-related Weekend at Bernie’s scenario, not his own scandal.) Before we render a judgment, we need commitments he won’t repeat his tirades and so continue to influence looksmaxxers, incels and their overlapping Venn Diagram of Nazi revivalists.
Hill’s belief that Ye’s antisemitic streak was good for business is symptomatic of something fundamentally off with the director’s treatment of cancel culture. It feels out-of-touch even — or maybe because — it draws from experience. Hill himself was the victim of cancellation some years ago, when his ex leaked texts in which he weaponized “therapy talk.” Hill’s project, with a cast that includes Reeves, Van Jones, Martin Scorsese, Drew Barrymore and a rare appearance from Cameron Diaz, is itself proof of how not all cancellations are created equal or indefinite.
The Outcome is in tension with itself, part Hill’s version of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” and Seth Rogen’s The Studio, part earnest penance that may or may not be coming from the director-writer himself.
One of the lines, delivered by Reef’s reality star mother (soap opera icon Susan Lucci), as a crew films their rapprochement for Bravo, sums the film up nicely: “Just because it’s performative doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.” We’ll have to take her word for it.
When it comes to Ye, there is some truth that antisemitism alone can’t crater a career — with the exception of lesser talents, it never could. We need not wonder how it has affected Ye’s popularity with Hill, who cited him on TMZ as “probably the greatest artist whoever lived.”
As Ira departs the film, we see his bumper sticker: “Honk if you can separate the art from the artist.” Hill would blow out the horn, and hopes you might too.
Jonah Hill’s The Outcome debits April 10 on AppleTV+.
The post Jonah Hill’s cancel culture dramedy makes an antisemitism exception — all about Kanye appeared first on The Forward.
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Dollar Struggles to Rebound as Fragile US-Iran Ceasefire Keeps Markets Wary
U.S. $100 bills. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
A fragile calm reigned across currency markets on Thursday as traders kept their eyes fixed on whether the ceasefire between the US and Iran would hold, a day after its announcement sent the dollar tumbling across the board.
The deal appeared to be on thin ice, as Israel bombed more targets in Lebanon, and there was no sign Iran had lifted its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused the worst disruption to global energy supplies in history.
Iranian negotiators were expected to set off later on Thursday for Pakistan for the first peace talks of the war, but Tehran said there would be no deal as long as Israel was striking Lebanon.
President Donald Trump said all US ships, aircraft, and military personnel would stay in place in and around Iran until it fully complied with a deal.
The uncertainty left currency markets on edge.
The euro was up 0.17 percent at $1.1683. It had gained 0.6 percent on Wednesday, but retreated late in the day having touched a one-month high of $1.1721 earlier in the session.
Sterling similarly was 0.21 percent higher at $1.342, after gaining 0.77 percent on Wednesday, but retreating from as high as $1.348.
Meanwhile, the Japanese yen lost some ground, with the dollar up 0.3 percent at 159.055 yen, having briefly dropped below 158 on Wednesday.
With the Strait of Hormuz closed, “the entire ceasefire remains tenuous,” said Derek Halpenny, head of research global markets EMEA at MUFG. But, he added, “while the US dollar has rebounded, the moves in general have been modest.”
He said the fact that further talks scheduled in Pakistan were still going ahead was keeping any retracement of Wednesday’s moves in check.
Elsewhere, new personal spending data released on Thursday showed that US inflation increased as expected in February and likely rose further in March amid the war with Iran, a trend that is expected to discourage the Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates for a while.
The personal consumption expenditures price index climbed 0.4% after an unrevised 0.3 gain in January, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said on Thursday.
Japan’s consumer confidence worsened in March for the first time in three months, a government survey showed on Thursday, adding to a recent string of data pointing to the potential economic hit from the Middle East war, which would complicate the Bank of Japan’s rate-hike decision. The yen showed little reaction to the data.
Speaking in parliament, BOJ Governor Kazuo Ueda said real interest rates were clearly negative and were keeping the country’s financial conditions accommodative.
Other currencies were also broadly steady. The Australian dollar was 0.15 percent higher at $0.7054, while the New Zealand dollar was 0.46 percent higher at $0.585. In cryptocurrencies, bitcoin was last down 0.97 percent at $70,680.
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Opposition Leader Lapid Calls the Ceasefire with Iran a ‘Political Disaster’
FILE PHOTO: Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid delivers a statement at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament,, in Jerusalem, February 13, 2023. REUTERS/Amir Cohen/File Photo
i24 News – Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid on Wednesday launched a sharp attack on the ceasefire agreement reached between the United States and Iran, calling it a “political disaster” and directly blaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a post on X, Lapid said the agreement sidelined Israel from critical decisions affecting its national security. “Never in our entire history have we experienced such a diplomatic disaster,” he wrote, adding that “Israel wasn’t even at the table when decisions were made regarding the core of our security.”
Lapid accused Netanyahu of failing to translate military achievements into strategic gains, despite praising the performance of the Israeli military and the resilience of the public during the conflict. “The army has accomplished everything that was asked of it, and the citizens have shown remarkable strength,” he said.
However, he argued that those efforts were not matched by political leadership. “Netanyahu has failed politically, failed strategically, and has not achieved any of the goals he set for himself,” Lapid added.
The opposition leader also warned of long-term consequences stemming from the agreement, saying the fallout could take years to repair. He criticized the government’s handling of the crisis, citing what he described as “arrogance, negligence, and a lack of strategic vision.”