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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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For poet Velvl Chernin, life is interwoven with the sword
אַז אַ פּאָעט באַטיטלט זײַן נײַ בוך „לעבן מיט אַ שװערד“ איז שׂכלדיק צו שטעלן צװײ פֿראַגעס: װעמענס לעבן, און װעלכע שװערד?
אין דער פּאָעזיע־קריטיק איז מען אָפֿט מאָל פֿאָרזיכטיק אַװעקצושטעלן אַ קלאָרן אונטערשײד צװישן דעם נאַראַטאָר פֿון די לידער, דאָס הײסט, דאָס קול, װאָס רעדט, און דעם פּאָעט אַלײן, דעם בעל־מחבר. דער נאַראַטאָר פֿון די לידער איז נישט גלאַט אַן אָפּשפּיגלונג פֿון דיכטער. (אַ באַרימטער בײַשפּיל: שעקספּירס סאָנעטן זײַנען נישט אַ פֿאַרצײכענונג פֿון זײַן ביאָגראַפֿיע, נאָר אַ נאַראַטיװ פֿון אַ פֿיקטיװן פּאַרשױן.)
מע קען אָבער אַ מאָל זײַן צו מדקדק וועגן דעם. אין דעם דאָזיקן בוך, איז קלאָר אַז דער הױפּט־נאַראַטאָר פֿון די לידער איז מער װײניקער דער זעלבער װאָס זײַן נאָמען געפֿינט זיך אױפֿן שער־בלאַט: װעלװל טשערנין, אַ באַקאַנטער פּאָעט, רעדאַקטאָר, אַרױסגעבער, און גרינדער פֿון זשורנאַל „ייִדישלאַנד“ װאָס װױנט כּמה יאָרן אין כּפֿר־אלדד, א קאָלאָניע אױפֿן מערבֿ־ברעג.
װי באַװוּסט איז ער אַ געבױרענער אינעם געוועזענעם סאָװעטן־פֿאַרבאַנד, געאַרבעט אין רעדאַקציע „סאָװעטיש הײמלאַנד,“ געװען (אומלעגאַל) דאָרטן אַקטיװ װי אַ ציוניסט, און דערנאָך עולה געװען אין 1990. דאָס דאָזיקע בוך איז זײַן זעכצנטע. קײן ביכל איז דאָס נישט; ס׳איז אַ װאָגיק באַנד פֿון 200 זײַטלעך. דער לעצטער אָפּטײל פֿון בוך נעמט אַרײַן געשליפֿענע, שאַרפֿע איבערזעצונגען פֿון פֿאַרשײדענע שפּראַכן, אַרײַנגערעכנט אוקראַיִניש, שפּאַניש, העברעיִש און רוסיש.
טשערנין, מיט אײן װאָרט, איז אַ פּאָעט אַ רעליגיעזער ציוניסט, אַ קאָלאָניסט אױפֿן מערבֿ־ברעג, און אַ כּלל־טוער אין דער ייִדישער ליטעראַרישער װעלט. ער פֿירט אױך אַן אינטערנאַצינאַל לעבן. אַ סך פֿון די דאָזיקע לידער טראָגן די נעמען פֿון אײראָפּעיִשע שטעט, און די באַציִונג צװישן אײראָפּע און ישׂראל, דורך די אױגן פֿון אַ רוסישן ייִד אַן עולה, גיט צו אַ פֿאַרשידן־מיניקײט צו דער זאַמלונג. אַזאַ, אין סך־הכּל, איז טשערנין, און אַזאַ איז דאָס „לעבן“ פֿון טיטל.
װאָס איז ער אױסן אין דעם בוך? מיט דעם דאַרף מען אָנקוקן די „שװערד“ פֿונעם טיטל. כאָטש מער װײניקער אַ דריטל פֿון בוך איז אָנגעשריבן געװאָרן נאָך פֿאַרן גורלדיקן ייִדישן יאָר תּשפּ״ג, און פֿאַרן כאַמאַס־אַטאַק פֿון זיבעטן אָקטאָבער, איז דער צענטער און אױסגאַנגפּונקט פֿונעם בוך, װי אַ גאַנצקײט, יענער אַטאַק, און װי אַזױ דער לירישער איך פֿונעם פּאָעט רעאַגירט דערױף.
לױט טשערנין איז דאָס לעבן איצט געקניפּט און געבונדן מיט דער שװערד. כאָטש ער פֿילט זיך געריסן, האַלט ער אױך אַז דאָס פּרוּװן פֿונאַנדערטײלן לעבן און שװער איז נאַיִװ.
און דו וועסט לעבן מיט דײַן שווערד, אויב דו וועסט לעבן.
אַלטערנאַטיוועס זײַנען וויזיעס, ניט מער.
ס׳איז צו געפֿערלעך צו אַ שלום חְנוניש שטרעבן.
דעם פֿאַקט דערווײַזן איז לעת־עתּה גאָר ניט שווער.
עס זײַנען קעגן דיר די הענט כּמעט פֿון אַלע.
עס מוז אויף אַלעמען זײַן דײַן ברוטאַלע האַנט.
די ווערטער זײַנען אַ נבֿואה אַ באַנאַלע,
וואָס ווערט מקוים, כאָטש דו קלאַפּסט זיך קאָפּ אין וואַנט.
בודאַפּעשט תּשפּ״ד
מע מוז זײַן ברוטאַל, לױט טשערנין. די שװערד װעט מען האַלטן נישט נאָר װי אַ דערװײַליקע נײטיקײט, נאָר אין אַ װיזיע פֿון אַחרית־הימים, װי ער רעכנט אױס אין זײַן ליד „גמר חתימה טובֿה“:
עס וואַרטן פֿאַרבלוטיקטע שווערדן
אויף ריינער ווי אמת נעילה
אין הימלען אויף ימען אויף ערדן
בלוט שפּריצט דורך און דורך די לידער. דאָס זײַנען אַװדאי די מחשבֿות פֿון אַ יחיד בימי מלחמה. דער ליריקער איז דאָך אַן אינדיװידועל, װיל מען הערן זײַנע געדאַנקען. אַ מלחמה־בוך אָן בלוט װאָלט נישט געװען אַקוראַט.
װידער קערט מען זיך צוריק צום טיטל. „לעבן מיט אַ שװערד“: איז נאָר פֿאַראַן אײן לעבן מיט אַ שװערד? װער געפֿינט זיך אױפֿן צװײטן עק שװערד?
מע זעט נישט און מע הערט נישט פֿון קרבנות, פֿון די פֿאַרשניטענע. דאָס װאָרט פּאַלעסטינער װערט דאָ נישט דערמאָנט, דאָס װאָרט „אַראַבער“ אױך נישט.
טשערנין קען מען פֿאַרגלײַכן מיט אַן אַנדער פּאָעט, אַ גדול פֿון אונדזער ליטעראַטור, װאָס האָט געהאַלטן פֿון ייִדישער סופּרעמאַטיע און פֿון אומגעצאַמטן כּוח פֿון ייִדישער שװערד פֿעסט אין דער האַנט קעגן גױשע שׂונאים. אורי צבֿי גרינבערג האָט אָבער בפֿירוש דערמאָנט די שׂונאים און געטײלט זיך מיט זײַן קלאָרער װיזיע פֿון דער װעלט. טשערנין בלײַבט אײַנגעשלאָסן אין זײַנע אײגענע בלוטיקע דלתּ אמות.
אַ ליריקער װאָס לאָזט אױס האַלב פֿון דער מלחמה באַגײט נישט נאָר אַ מאָראַלישע נאָר אױך אַן עסטעטישע עוולה. װעמען הרגעט די שװערד? פֿאַר װאָס זעט מען נישט די מתים אױף דער דאָזיקער קאַנװע פֿון קריג?
ס׳איז אַקוראַט און נײטיק אָנצורופֿן טשערנין בײַם נאָמען: אַ טאַלאַנטירטער פּאָעט, אַ געשיקטער איבערזעצער פֿון פֿיל שפּראַכן, אַ שטיצער און דערמעגלעכער פֿון דער הײַנטיקער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור — און אױך אַזאַ װאָס איז גרײט מקריבֿ צו זײַן יענעם.
עס שמעקט די לופֿט מיט הייסן שטויב,
וואָס בלײַבט דעם זיגער פֿון זײַן רויב.
איך האָב געזיגט. עס טוט מיר באַנג.
אַלץ ווערט צעשטערט. אַ שיינעם דאַנק.
דער דאָזיקער בולטער רמז אױף סוצקעװערס „װאָס װעט בלײַבן“ איז אױך אַן אָנװוּנק אױף דער מאָס פֿון דער טראַגעדיע װאָס דאָס ייִדישע פֿאָלק האָט אַדורכגעלעבט מיטן זיבעטן אָקטאָבער, און װאָס װערט דאָ פֿאַרטײַטשט פֿון טשערנין.
לױטן דאָזיקן פּאָעט איז דער מוסר־השׂכּל אַ בלוטיקער, אױף אײביק, כאָטש מיט ספֿקות און אינערלעכע קאָנפֿליקטן. ס׳איז אַ לירישער אַפּאָקאַליפּסיס אין אַ הערמעטישן קאַמער.
עס קען זײַן אַז מיט דעם שטעלט זיך פֿאָר די צוקונפֿט פֿון דער ייִדישער פּאָעזיע, בלוט און שװערד, בשעת אַלע אַלטערנאַטיװן װערן טאַקע צעשטערט. װעמען זאָל מען באַדאַנקען?
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5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed
Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory in the Michigan Democratic primary means he’s going to have to work hard to persuade skeptical liberal Michigan voters.
I’m not from Michigan, but I am liberal. And I am skeptical.
I appreciate El-Sayed’s political skills and his relentless focus on the health and economic disparities that undermine the American dream for so many.
But while many Jewish Michiganders supported El-Sayed, his narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens has many other Michigan Democratic voters worried. It’s “ridiculous” that Democratic Jews wouldn’t vote for El-Sayed based on his positions on Israel, former Rep. Andy Levin told the Forward, but I’m not sure El-Sayed’s views on Israel are the main concern.
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told JTA, “he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism.”
Many of El-Sayed’s comments and actions during the primary cast that support into doubt. Here are the five questions I’d like to see Michiganders put to him:
You said, “Hurt people hurt people.” Do you also believe that enraged people hurt people?
After a man whose family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon attacked children at a West Bloomfield, Michigan synagogue, you said, “Hurt people hurt people.” You said you were explaining the act of terror, not excusing it. But we know too that incendiary rhetoric also foments violence. The Egyptian man who attacked Jews at a peaceful march in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2025 screamed anti-Israel political phrases and said he targeted the group because he believed they were “Zionists.” You have called Israel “evil” like Hamas, “bloodthirsty,” and you singled out AIPAC as uniquely nefarious and powerful among all influence groups in the country. Doesn’t such rhetoric endanger the lives of constituents you claim you want to protect? After extremists attempted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, you accused President Donald Trump of inciting them via tweet. Will you cool your own rhetoric?
Is there any circumstance you would vote to send military aid to Israel?
Oct. 7, 2023 was supposed to be an all-out war. Hamas along with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran and the Houthis discussed striking Israel in unison, and could have. In such a scenario, as in the October 1973 war, Israel would have faced many thousands of casualties if not an existential threat as it quickly exhausted its defensive shield. Now imagine you were in the Senate during such a scenario. Would you have voted to send help to an ally? You said you supported sending military aid to Ukraine when it faced invasion. Why not Israel in a similar scenario?
How would you work toward a two-state solution?
You told CNN that every definition of a Jewish state “ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.” You told The New Yorker that you support a two-state solution with equal rights and self-determination for Israeli Jews and Palestinians — which is a mainstream liberal Zionist position. So explain: What’s so illiberal about a Jewish-majority state you support? And do you believe in it enough to work toward one?
Is money really the only reason politicians and others support Israel?
You accused Israel’s supporters in Congress of being motivated solely by money. Is there really no other possible reason? Until Israel’s post-Oct. 7 destruction of Gaza, a majority of Americans and the vast majority of American Jews supported Israel. Couldn’t congressional support reflect their constituents’ support or their own religious or political beliefs? Could they believe in Jewish self-determination, especially post-Holocaust? Or is support for a Jewish state only a function of Jewish money (see #1)?
Which do you care about more, the Jewish vote, or Hasan Piker?
The Twitch streamer Hasan Piker said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. He called a Jewish man a “bloodthirsty violent pig dog.” You defended your appearance with Piker by saying you needed to reach his three million followers. I get that: Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris helped tank their campaigns by refusing to engage young voters wherever they could. But you continued to campaign with Piker, and refused to disavow his extreme rhetoric, saying you wouldn’t be distracted by “cancel culture.” No one is asking you to cancel him. But why won’t you, at least, confront him on his rhetoric?
There is, as you and countless pundits have pointed out, a lot at stake in this election. Right now too many American Jews feel that one of those things is their own safety. Please answer these questions, Dr. El-Sayed.
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The post 5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
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Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys!
If you have read any one of the at least 60 English translations of Homer’s Odyssey or have seen Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie, then you are probably aware that Odysseus leads a more active life than the average person. As if living through the Trojan War weren’t hard enough, he blinds the cyclops Polyphemus and gets cursed by Poseidon with epically bad weather. His men are regularly transformed into pigs, picked off by Laestrygonian giants, and drowned in storms. The nymph Calypso detains him on her island for seven years and forces him to be her lover, (although whether this counts as a hardship depends on your perspective). The man of twists and turns has seen a lot. But he probably never predicted his story would be translated into Yiddish. Or Ladino.
At first, the parallel lives of the two men who translated The Odyssey into Yiddish and Ladino sound like the makings of a sphinx’s riddle, or a cryptic prophecy from the Oracle at Delphi: both men would be called “Moshe”; both would be alive at the beginning of the Holocaust; only one would survive to the end. Their names were Moshe Leyb Pitshenik (1895 – 1941) of the Odiseye (אָדיסייע) and Moshe Ha-Elion (1925-2022) of La Odisea.
The two men never met, yet there are unexpected rhymes between the lives of the Moshes, as if their lives were composed in the same meter. Not even a photo survives of scholar, writer and translator Moshe Leyb Pitshenik, but the Congress for Jewish Culture records that he was born in Zlotshev, eastern Galicia, now Ukraine. He spent his whole life traveling various pathways to erudition. As a child, he attended a religious elementary school and a small synagogue study hall before working as a bank employee in Vienna. The corporate life must not have been for Pitshenik, for he soon moved back to Poland and enrolled in a teachers’ seminary. He spent the rest of his life as a teacher and director at the local Jewish high school in Loyvitsh (Łowicz), writing ferociously on the side.
His poems, articles, short stories, and translations appeared in publications in Krakow, Warsaw, Łodz, and Vilna. Occasionally he would publish under pen names like “A Zaytiker,” an outsider, and “Nekhed Mohel,” which translates to “the grandson of the mohel (ritual circumciser),” but sounds suspiciously like something else.
In 1937, he pulled off his translational tour de force: the Odiseye, so literally epic an achievement that he won an award from the Yiddish PEN Club, the Yiddish branch of the PEN international network with epicenters in Warsaw, Vilnius and New York City. In the book’s introduction, fellow poet and translator Shloyme Shaynberg gave Pitshenik a hearty mazal tov for “anchoring one of Homer’s magical ships on our shores.”
But the time to celebrate ran short. Just two years after the Odiseye’s publication, the Nazis invaded Poland, confining Pitshenik and thousands of other Jews in the Łowicz ghetto. He had been working on an original epic poem in ancient Greek at the time of the invasion. Had he been allowed to finish it, the poem would have been the first original ancient Greek epic to be published since the 5th century C.E. In 1941, he was led into the Kazimierz Forest and murdered, leaving the poem unfinished.
Pitshenik was already 30 years old when Moshe Ha-Elion, his Sephardic counterpart, was born in Thessaloniki in 1925. Like Pitshenik, Ha-Elion studied at a Jewish primary school before receiving a secular education, discovering The Iliad and The Odyssey in ancient Greek during junior high. Ha-Elion was 16 when the Nazis invaded Thessaloniki, he recounts in his oral history for the United States Holocaust Museum. Two years later, in 1943, Ha-Elion and his mother, sister, and grandparents boarded freight wagons believing that they would be resettled in Poland. But these wagons were headed for Auschwitz. On arrival, every member of Ha-Elion’s immediate family was sent to the gas chambers but him.
For the next 21 months, Ha-Elion labored in Auschwitz. Teaching became his lifeline: He gave Greek lessons to a Christian prisoner with special privileges in exchange for food. In 1945, as the Allies approached, the Nazis transferred Ha-Elion and thousands of other prisoners to concentration camps in Austria. The hunger, Ha-Elion recalled later in an interview with El Mundo, was so unbearable that he ate train coal to survive.
After the liberation of the camps, Ha-Elion entered mandatory Palestine on a refugee ship. He fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Humanities at the University of Tel Aviv. Like Pitshenik, he spent the rest of his life stirring up a tornado of writing across genres: He wrote a memoir of his time in the camps, a book of autobiographical poems in Ladino entitled En Los Kampos de la Muerte, or In the Death Camps, and even music to accompany one of these poems, La Djovenika al Lager (The Young Girl in the Lager), about the murder of his sister Nina.
But it was not until the end of his life that Ha-Elion undertook his translation of The Odyssey. When Ha-Elion was 90, he and the Israeli poet Avner Peretz published a Hebrew and Ladino dual translation of The Odyssey. He even managed to keep the poem in dactylic hexameter, a line-for-line Ladino mirror of the ancient Greek epic.
There are strange reflections of each Moshe in the Odysseys that they translated. For Pitshenik, the story seems omen-like: In the poem’s first line, Pitshenik translates the first adjective to describe Odysseus, polútropon, as the Yiddish word farvoglt, or “far from home.” This is unusual. English translators usually style Odysseus as “cunning” or a “man of twists and turns” or just downright “complicated.” It is as if Pitshenik read the signs of his own coming displacement in Odysseus before he read them in himself. But the translation’s strange prescience deepens just a few words later. Odysseus, Pitshenik says, participated in the “khurboynes” of holy Troy. At the time Pitshenik wrote this, a “khurbn” meant a total, cataclysmic destruction. It was reserved to describe horrors like the destruction of the first and second Temples and pogroms in Russia during World War I. But Pitshenik could not have known then that the word “Khurbn” would one day be used as a metonym for the approaching Holocaust. In Pitshenik’s translation, far-from-home Odysseus would survive a “khurbn” and find his way back. But Pitshenik himself never did.
For Ha-Elion, The Odyssey is like another form of autobiography. Like Odysseus, he was flung far from home by war, and spent the rest of his life trying to find his way home — or some place that felt like it. If translation is the process of rendering something foreign into something familiar, then perhaps translation is an attempt at homecoming in itself. Pitshenik and Ha-Elion never returned to their homes again after the War. But in the Odiseye and La Odisea, a piece of home survives. And it sounds like this:
Kontame, Muza, del ombre astuto…
O Muze! Bazing mir di maysim fun farvogltn gvir…
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns!
The post Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys! appeared first on The Forward.
