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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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‘I felt I couldn’t talk about the war’: Jewish and Muslim teens make space for tough conversations
For Jewish student Maxanne Wallace-Segall and Muslim student Nabila Rahman, the months after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel were filled with a tense quiet.
Then freshmen at Stuyvesant High School, a public school on Manhattan’s southern tip, the two girls had only been friends for a few weeks. As their social media feeds became inundated with polarizing content from across the spectrum, neither of them knew how to bring up what had happened.
“I felt like I couldn’t talk about the war with one of my closest friends in the world, just because I was terrified about what I would say and what she would say,” Wallace-Segall said.
That tension ended when Wallace-Segall interviewed Rahman for an article in their high school paper about the pain many students were experiencing in the first months of the Israel Hamas War. Broaching the subject for the first time, they realized that — despite coming from different perspectives — both were primarily concerned that their friends were OK.
“It wasn’t a question of ‘do you support Israel or Palestine?’. It was a question of [if you were] OK; if your family was OK. That was what mattered at the moment; her opinion didn’t matter, even if it differed from mine,” Rahman told Wallace-Segall for the article.
Now rising high school seniors, the duo runs The Together Project, a citywide organization dedicated to dialogue between Muslim and Jewish teens — Zionists and anti-Zionists alike. This summer, that dialogue has deepened and the reach has widened with the launch of a twice-weekly program called the Ohel/Ahl Fellowship, named after Hebrew and Arabic words for friendship. Since June, Jewish and Muslim teens from public, private, religious, and secular schools in the New York area have come together around sacred texts, swapped stories, consulted experts and explored each other’s neighborhoods and perspectives.
Emboldened by their first conversation, Wallace-Segall and Rahman began speaking about the conflict with Muslim and Israeli friends. But, when starting the organization, those friends opted not to participate. The Muslim friend’s family refused to let them talk to people who supported Israel, while the Israeli friend wasn’t allowed to talk to anti-Zionists. The organization continues to face this challenge, with some criticizing its inclusive nature. On one Instagram reel posted by the project, a user commended the concept, but pointed out the number of Palestinian deaths and disagreed with participants working alongside Zionists.
“i was like yessss this is what we need!!” they wrote at first. “only for u to include zionists 💀absolutely not. none of you are truly anti-zionists if you agree to work closely with zionists, especially at this time.”
But that misses the point, Wallace-Segall said. “To exclude the Zionist narrative would be to exclude the issue itself.” That widespread opposition toward dialogue highlights “the necessity and urgency of starting it even more,” she added.
To expand citywide, the girls drew upon their previous connections — someone with whom Wallace-Segall often debated about the subject, another who had written poetry about her religious identity. Currently, the organization has branches at four public high schools in three of the city’s five boroughs.
The Together Project also established a partnership with the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a social activism organization that offers meeting space for several grassroots organizations and hosts all branches of the Together Project, and other interested students, for a citywide conference three times a year in winter, spring and summer.
At those seasonal meetings, students go over historical timelines, read books, articles, sacred texts, and poetry and push themselves to grapple with hard topics. The conversation subjects range from comparisons of the Torah and Quran to what Muslim and Jewish teachings say about queerness, and how being a member of the LGBTQ community informs support for Israel, given its comparatively tolerant culture, and support for Palestinians in Gaza, given the nature of their collective struggle.
Wallace-Segall’s favorite conversations are those that question “why do you believe what you believe?”
“It really gets everyone to think about the specific moments with their families and their friends and reading the news in which different aspects of their opinions have been shaped,” she said.
Last November, members of the group attended a United Nations conference on establishing a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction. As she listened, Wallace-Segall was inspired by those “dedicating their lives to committing to peace.” At the end, four of The Together Project members were given the opportunity to speak about their organization and share their thoughts on the solutions that had been presented.
“So often in the UN, when we see discussions of rebuilding communities … it’s decades or years after the conflict happened,” Wallace-Segall said in her speech. “I think the time to start rebuilding communities is now.”
At Ramaz Upper School, a Jewish day school in Manhattan, now rising senior Gabriel Flatto-Katz found himself in a Jewish bubble. Amidst the tensions of the New York City mayoral election, he realized that he “didn’t have any Muslim person that I could call a friend,” and sought to start an interfaith student organization.
Despite reaching out to many Muslim organizations, however, he wasn’t able to find any interested partners. Then he discovered the Together Project and helped Wallace-Segall and Rahman develop this summer’s Ohel/Ahl Fellowship.
The fellowship has enabled students who were already involved, along with many new ones like Flatto-Katz, to engage more deeply with meetings twice a week. So far, the fellows have hosted speakers from the Rose Castle Foundation, which helps equip leaders to navigate conflict; explored the Islamic wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and analyzed poetry by Israeli and Palestinian writers.
Rather than jump right into sensitive political discussions, students explored each other’s religious identities and established trust in initial meetings, so they have felt more comfortable sharing sensitive opinions in the latter half of the fellowship.
According to Gershon Rozenberg, a rising senior at SAR High School, a co-ed modern Orthodox yeshiva in Manhattan, that turning point arrived during a recent discussion the students had about war. Participants shared conflicts that felt most personal to them and their families and how this might impact their thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some mentioned the Vietnam War, the Bangladesh Civil War and the Holocaust.
Rozenberg called it “the most vulnerable conversation we’ve had among fellows.”
For Rahman, this conversation helped her realize just how personal the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for Jews. “For people like Gabi who literally have family in Israel, there was so much more at stake,” said Rahman, who doesn’t know anyone who is Palestinian.
Along with speakers, the fellowship has a board of mentors from Jewish and Muslim organizations, including Rose Castle, the Tannenbaum Foundation, Jewish Theological Seminary, and a Palestinian representative from Debate for Peace.
“We’re still kids running a kids’ program,” Flatto-Katz said. Mentors provide necessary guidance on how to run an interfaith organization, advise on ground rules during sessions and recommend texts to study. To build a consistent base of students at each meeting, mentors also have helped recruit teenagers they had worked with previously.
Flatto-Katz recruited Rozenberg after reading Rozenberg’s piece in SAR’s campus newspaper arguing that the school “should do a better job of understanding the Palestinian perspective.”
To complement the students from private Jewish day schools, leaders have been reaching out to private Muslim schools. But they’ve encountered difficulty.
“A lot of the kids have never met a Jewish person before, so it’s hard for them to make that first step,” Rahman said.
Many of the students from private Jewish schools say they have been moved by the contributions of Muslim participants, including rituals like chanting from the Qur’an or talking about their religion. “People have enjoyed the ability to hear something so different than what they’re used to,” Flatto-Katz said.
Within Jewish youth spaces, Flatto-Katz said students strongly support Zionism, but also crave hearing new perspectives. It’s not always easy for Flatto-Katz to “have really hard conversations,” as he has family in the region, but he senses and shares a “hunger for understanding.” Agreement or consensus is not required, he said.
“This is my friend Nabila who doesn’t agree with me on 99% of things, and I think it’s really cool that we get frozen yogurt together,” Flatto-Katz said.
To Rahman, the diversity of high school environments and the formative teenage years are what makes the work they are doing now so significant.
“Making sure younger people are involved in this kind of things is so important,” she said, “because they are the ones who are going to be shaping the future.”
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In the history of a family’s pianos, a glimpse of a disappearing New York history
Not that long ago, many homes had pianos. Few do now, and a sad sight is a piano left out on the street. Two years ago we moved a Steinway into our home, and until recently, we had two grands in our living room, the Steinway and the Chickering, which I grew up with. There is also a mini Schoenhut, along with a full-size Casio keyboard upstairs.
The Chickering first resided at my grandparents’ apartment on Central Park West. Under it sat a Schroederesque Schoenhut grand. I would sit on the bench in front of the Schoenhut and tinkle the keys while my grandmother Anna played above. The Chickering, a five-foot, seven-inch quarter grand, came to my childhood home in Forest Hills after she died in 1966. There my brother David and I took lessons from our teacher Fred Kahn. Mr. Kahn was easily in his 70s, and a former student of the concert virtuoso Arthur Friedheim who had studied with Franz Liszt. He performed at Carnegie Hall when he was just eight, and later Steinway Hall had him play at their showroom across 57th St. as a way to attract customers. I fondly recall my lessons with him, especially his improvisations, how he effortlessly switched tempo and rhythm so a piece by Bach morphed into a country & western or klezmer tune.
I first heard my wife Lillie play on the Chickering. It was Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 10. Lillie studied at Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music when we lived in Kew Gardens, and we had her Sargent grand in our apartment. She also had a Baldwin spinet at her mom’s in Manhattan. We moved the Sargent to Lillie’s sister Yuri’s apartment when I had a fellowship at Northwestern in 1994. Then when my mom and dad sold the house the following year, Lillie and I had the Chickering hauled up a steep stoop in Park Slope. I remember it being so heavy that it cracked one of the brownstone risers, though the piano was thankfully not damaged. Even better, our landlord had been planning to restore the stoop, so we didn’t have to chip in for the chip.
Soon after, Lillie took a teacher-training program at the School for Strings in Manhattan to learn the Suzuki Method. In 2001, we moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and in 2006 spent a summer in Chicago. One of the first things we did was buy the Casio. Early one morning we were awakened by the sound of Chopin coming from the front room. Lillie and I rushed out to find our four-year-old Emma at the keyboard. Alas, we quickly realized that she was not the reincarnation of Clara Schumann after whom her older sister was named. Instead she had somehow pressed the right series of keys, and it played the programed piece.
Back home, Emma had cello lessons in nearby Montclair, and while Lillie taught in our living room, Clara, Emma and I would drive to Manhattan where Clara would spend up to two hours with her piano teacher, Barbara Herman. During Clara’s lesson, Emma and I would roam the halls of the nearby Natural History Museum. We all would then go to Ottomanelli and have chicken pot pies and then ice cream next door at Emack & Bolio’s.
The Chickering filled our home with much music. Clara practiced on it, and Lillie would go over music with her. I enjoyed it when they played together, especially a duet from Schubert’s “Trout Quintet.”Lillie would also help Emma prepare for her cello recitals, and later went over pieces with her when she took up the clarinet and joined the high school marching band.
Since the early ‘90s, Lillie has been studying on the Upper West Side with her teacher Denise Kahn. She and Denise’s other students regularly gather at their various Manhattan apartments to perform their pieces for each other, and as Lillie practices at home she is always amazed that I can soundly nap on the couch just a few feet away during her most fortissimo playing.
The Steinway made it to our home from the country house of one of those pianist friends. In 2024, Lillie and I spent a cool spring afternoon at her place in Stockbridge, Mass. so Lillie could test out the piano; while there she Zoomed her piano technician back in New Jersey to ask questions. The Steinway is a rebuilt six-foot, model O from 1910. Until it arrived, it was on the Chickering that Lillie’s students had their lessons for the past two decades.
Four days a week, our home is filled with the sounds of a wide variety of pieces, from “Frog on Logs” to sonatinas by Friedrich Kuhlau, rags by Scott Joplin, even the “Linus and Lucy” Peanuts tune by Vince Guaraldi. Some of the younger ones can’t sit still, but it is always satisfying to see those who stick with it and then one day start to see their lesson as more than a chore imposed on them by their parents, and come to love playing music. Each June, they all perform in a recital at the Congregational Church up the street.
Hundreds of piano makers once thrived in New York and Boston. Chickering started in Boston in 1823, became one of the nation’s finest manufacturers, and had a hall on 57th St. that rivaled Steinway’s just a block to the west. The firm moved to East Rochester, NY in 1927 and stopped producing instruments in 1983. Sadly, most American piano makers are now gone. On bulk days in our town, we have seen a few pianos sitting on the curb, and Lillie has alerted others of their presence in the hope that someone would rescue them.
Two years ago, I was out for a walk. Along the curb sat a diminutive Schoenhut upright. I have no idea what happened to my grandmother’s Schoenhut grand, and happily hoisted and adopted this homeless one. Not surprisingly, Lillie’s students have embraced the mini-me piano, and during their lessons, some of the younger ones like to hop over and play on it, with the instrument offering up its chime-like, glockenspiel sounding versions of their pieces while Lillie accompanies them on the piano.
We only need one main piano, though, and the last thing we were going to do was toss out the Chickering. I do realize that the piano is but an object, one fashioned from mahogany, rosewood, ebony, ivory, metal wires, and felt. But the Chickering had a real presence and voice in our home, one that brought joy. Quite simply, it was part of our family. I am therefore not surprised that I got teary eyed as we said goodbye to it on June 15. I am glad to say that movers ferried it to a new home up the road. And while the spot where it stood, one filled with much meaning, seems quite empty now, we do hope that the Chickering will create fond memories for another family.
Before it left our home, Lillie played on it that Beethoven sonata that she first performed for me.
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Lively Yiddish Forward columnist Miriam Hoffman has died
The Yiddish writer, Forverts columnist, playwright and Yiddish lecturer Miriam Hoffman passed away July 29 in Coral Springs, Florida. She was 90 years old.
Hoffman was a talented storyteller, as seen in the 2017 Forverts video about her, one of ten episodes in its documentary series, Yiddish Writers Monologues. In the 55-minute clip, she describes in dramatic detail her family’s journey from Siberia to a forced labor camp to a displaced persons camp and finally, to New York. The video is in Yiddish with English subtitles.
In a book, also published in 2017, A Breed Apart: A Miraculous Escape from Russia, she tells her life story again, this time in English.
For many years, Hoffman penned a lively column for the Forverts, where she commented, often with biting humor, on certain character types in Jewish society she disapproved of — like American-born Jews snubbing their noses at fellow Jews who had recently arrived from Europe, something she experienced first-hand.
She also wrote about the blatant sexism she encountered in the 1960s and ’70s among the leadership of Yiddish organizations like the Workmen’s Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture.
But other essays had a serious, softer voice, like the one she told about her decision as a young teen to suddenly cut off her curly locks in order to look more “American” — and how her mother reacted to her daughter’s “rebellion.”
She also hosted a popular Yiddish radio program on the Forward station WEVD.
Hoffman loved the Yiddish theater and began writing plays herself. She and fellow playwright Rena Borow wrote the book for the musical, Songs of Paradise, based on the biblical poetry of Yiddish troubadour Itzik Manger. The show ran at NYC’s Public Theater and the Shakespeare Festival in 1989, drawing a rave review from The New York Times. Her plays were also staged in Montreal and in several European countries.
For 23 years, Hoffman was a popular Yiddish lecturer at Columbia University. In 2011, she published a Yiddish textbook, Key to Yiddish, that included not only lessons in grammar, but also passages on Eastern European Jewish history, customs, songs and holiday content.
I was personally most impressed with her dogged determination to preserve Yiddish as a spoken language with younger generations. In the 1960s, while teaching at the Sholem Aleichem Shul 21, an afternoon Yiddish school in the Bronx, she and three fellow Yiddish cultural activists — educator Gella Schweid Fishman, pianist-composer Malka Gottlieb and artist Tsirl Waletzky — published a series of Yiddish children’s books through a publishing house they created themselves, called Oyfgang (Sunrise).
As Hoffman and Schweid Fishman told me years later, the mood in the Yiddish world then was so pessimistic, and the attitude towards women so dismissive, that none of the Yiddish cultural organizations — including the Workers Circle and the Congress for Jewish Culture — showed any interest in publishing the books.
But Hoffman and her colleagues didn’t give up. An example of this concerned a musical Purim play they wrote and published in 1968, “Purim iz a shpil aza” (“Purim is a time to play”). On the book cover it gives the male name Gavriel Tolyes as the author. But this was a pseudonym; the real author was Hoffman.
“We understood that no one would take our book seriously if they found out that four women published it,” Hoffman told me. “So we took my mother’s name Tolye, and came up with the name Gavriel Tolyes.”
Years later, Hoffman translated the Purim play into English where it was performed and made into a video. This time, the author’s name was her own.
Hoffman was born Miriam Shmulevitsh in Tobolsk, Siberia in 1936. In 1950, her family immigrated to the United States where she studied Yiddish pedagogy at the Jewish Teachers Seminary until 1957. Years later, she finished her bachelor’s at the University of Miami and received a master’s from Columbia University in 1983.
During the 1970s she and her husband Mendl and two young sons, Avrom (Avi) and Binyomin, lived in Israel for several years where she hosted the first Yiddish television program in the Jewish state, together with the popular comedian Shimon Dzigan.
Hoffman often said that one of her main goals in life was to help instill Jewish pride among Jews of all ages in order to stem the tide of assimilation. In 2015 she, along with her son — the renowned Yiddish actor, director and producer, Avi Hoffman — launched the Yiddishkayt Initiative, an organization dedicated to bringing Jews back to their roots through lectures and performances that portray Jewish values and cultural traditions. For Hoffman, this was exactly what she had been waiting for.
Miriam Hoffman is survived by her two sons, Avi and Benjamin, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
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