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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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Abdul El-Sayed and Jamie Raskin sidestep Hasan Piker, and Israel, in Michigan campaign stops
(JTA) — ANN ARBOR – As Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed made campaign stops with a prominent Jewish congressional leader on Wednesday, there was one subject neither he, nor his Democratic allies onstage, were interested in discussing.
“Don’t any reporter ask me again about Hasan Piker,” Michigan U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell told the crowd at an Ann Arbor, Mich., town hall, to cheers. “It’s not what November is about.”
Dingell’s crack was the only time the prominent left-wing streamer’s name was mentioned at all during the pair of El-Sayed rallies that day. Piker’s recent comments that American Jews who “tie” themselves to Israel would “suffer the consequences of the actions of that state” prompted uproar from several corners of Democratic leadership. Despite this, El-Sayed’s new Jewish campaign surrogate, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, avoided the topic altogether.
That reluctance to talk about Piker on the campaign trail Wednesday extended to the candidate himself. El-Sayed didn’t mention Piker, nor Israel, once in either of his campaign stops with Raskin, except when asked directly by reporters.
The former county health official campaigned with Piker during the primary — including at one stop at the University of Michigan a stone’s throw away from Wednesday’s event — as the two made opposition to Israel a central issue of his candidacy. But at a press conference following his Ann Arbor event, El-Sayed described Piker as “a streamer in California,” adding that the media was putting too much focus on his most prominent supporter.
“I’m less interested in going to the tabloid version of our politics where we cover this as who’s in, who’s out, who’s up, who’s down, who’s talking to who,” El-Sayed said. “I’m a lot more interested in talking to the people in the state who had a bum deal because of Donald Trump and the politics that [El-Sayed’s GOP opponent] Mike Rogers has been the epitome of for a very long time.”
Raskin, one of the most prominent Jewish Democrats in the House, also showed a reluctance to talk about Jewish voters in general. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked the congressman in Ann Arbor how he would sell El-Sayed to Jewish Democrats uncomfortable with his rhetoric. In response, he did not mention Jewish concerns.
“Those of us who have been fighting Donald Trump and his authoritarianism and corruption and violence against American citizens and immigrants for 10 years now understand that this is an essential referendum about the future,” Raskin said in response. “Will we have democracy or will we have autocracy?”
He added that he has been “campaigning for Democrats all over the country,” and praised the party for being “a very big tent.”
“Just like any big family Thanksgiving dinner, there can be arguments and people jostling, and there’s unruliness,” Raskin said. “But fundamentally, we all believe in democracy and freedom and the progress and prosperity of our people.”
Yet questions about Piker, and how close the movement he represents may come to remaking the Democratic Party’s values, hang over both Michigan’s Senate race and the future of Jewish inclusion in the party. As the party fights to retake Congress this fall, some liberal Jewish voters believe the growing backlash against Israel among the “big tent”’s progressive wing is damaging their historic coalition. A growing number of Jewish voters in Michigan who previously backed Democrats are now supporting Rogers instead, and El-Sayed’s association with Piker is often cited as a key reason why.
In playing the role of uniter, Raskin is slaloming carefully between the party’s different factions. Before campaigning with El-Sayed, the congressman stumped for Michigan Rep. Hillary Scholten, a moderate Democrat who has withheld her endorsement of El-Sayed while specifying his association with Piker as a sticking point.
Also being silent on the rallies is a key target of Piker’s: Michigan state Sen. Jeremy Moss, whose likeness the streamer had made his latest comments in front of. The Jewish and pro-Israel Democratic congressional candidate is running in a heavily Jewish district that encompasses Oakland County, where El-Sayed’s second rally of the day took place. In recent days, Moss said that El-Sayed was “going to have to demonstrate some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community.” He declined to comment to JTA about the day’s rallies.
As they largely avoided the elephant in the room among Democrats, El-Sayed and his allies also preached the importance of party unity in taking on their Republican opponents.
“There’s a big effort to divide us,” Raskin told the second rally’s audience in Farmington Hills. “They’re trying to pick on disagreements in our party, trying to exacerbate conflict, because we have freedom of thought in our party and freedom of speech in our party and freedom of dialogue.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Abdul El-Sayed and Jamie Raskin sidestep Hasan Piker, and Israel, in Michigan campaign stops appeared first on The Forward.
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Dolly Parton’s legacy includes the Jewish children’s book program she inspired
(JTA) — Dolly Parton, the singer who died Tuesday at age 80 after a brief bout with cancer, was mourned around the world as a stellar songwriter, consummate country hitmaker, savvy entrepreneur and generous philanthropist.
In Jewish circles, she was also remembered as the inspiration for PJ Library, a program that sends free children’s books to Jewish families in order to foster Jewish values and traditions.
In 2015, when Harold Grinspoon launched PJ Library, he took a page from Parton, who a decade earlier had started Imagination Library, a literacy program that mails free children’s books to families across the U.S.
After hearing Parton interviewed about the program, Grinspoon, a philanthropist in and out of the Jewish community, signed on as a sponsor of the Imagination Library in Western Massachusetts, where he lives.
“We should create a Jewish version of Imagination Library,” said Grinspoon, according to a 2023 recollection by his daughter-in-law and president of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, Winnie Sandler Grinspoon.
“Harold was looking for ways to build Jewish literacy,” she wrote. “He was witnessing a lack of connection to the values, stories, and traditions that have been at the center of the Jewish experience for millennia.”
Two decades later, PJ Library has more than 670,000 subscribers in 40 countries.
On Tuesday, in a tribute to Parton, PJ Library and the Harold Grinspoon Foundation recalled a meeting between the two in 2023. According to an Instagram post, “she shared the following with him: ‘I am honored to get to help inspire a love of reading in children. They truly are our future.’”
“Harold remembers Dolly as ‘a truly amazing person — not only a great artist, but a great entrepreneur and philanthropist,” according to the post. “We honor Dolly for educating millions, for her remarkable career, her kindness, her art, and especially her generosity.”
“Dolly’s generosity of spirit extended far beyond inspiring the creation of PJ Library,” Alex Zablotsky, PJ Library’s executive director, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Parton drew inspiration for her art and philanthropy from her hardscrabble roots in rural Tennessee. She was one of 12 kids growing up in a one-room log cabin in the Smoky Mountains. Parton’s father never learned how to read or write.
“This actually started because my father could not read and write, and I saw how crippling that could be,” Parton said of the Imagination Library at a ceremony where she was awarded a Carnegie Medal for her partnership with a pediatric hospital in East Tennessee, now named for Parton.
“My dad was a very smart man. And I often wondered what he could have done had he been able to read and write. So that is the inspiration,” she said.
Parton had a close bond with other Jews, notably Sandy Gallin, the manager who guided her from Nashville to mainstream pop stardom, according to the Forward.
When Gallin died in 2017, Parton said, “Nobody could quite get how the Christian Southern girl and the New York Jewish boy could have so much in common. But it was real.”
One trouble spot, however, came in a 1994 interview with Vogue Magazine, when Parton mused about starting a television series about a country singer who turns to gospel music. She gave up the idea, she said, because “most of the people out here [Hollywood] are Jewish and it’s frightening for them to promote Christianity.”
She later apologized in a letter to Abe Foxman, then head of the Anti-Defamation League, JTA reported at the time.
“I know how stereotypes can be hurtful,” she wrote. “Like all Americans of good will, I recognize the importance of rejecting prejudice.”
Foxman accepted her apology. “Whatever she said was unfortunate, and she recognizes that,’” Foxman told The New York Times. “I know it’s not easy for celebrities to publicly say they made a mistake. As far as we are concerned, the matter is behind us.”
On Tuesday, Laura Liebman, director of development for The Bronfman Fellowship for young Jewish leaders, paid tribute to the singer, who was a feminist and an ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
“Dolly somehow managed to transcend race, class, religion, politics and gender,” Liebman wrote in an essay for eJewishPhilanthropy. “As the Jewish community becomes increasingly siloed, we could all learn from Dolly’s radical acceptance and show more love and compassion for our fellow Jews.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Dolly Parton’s legacy includes the Jewish children’s book program she inspired appeared first on The Forward.
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Second Reform synagogue in Israel has windows broken
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – A window was broken at a Reform synagogue on Sunday in the central Israeli city of Ramat Hasharon less than two weeks after a similar incident occurred in Jerusalem in an incident the mayor called an act of vandalism.
Congregation Darchei Noam called the incident a hate crime, and Ramat Hasharon Mayor Itzik Rochberger condemned the incident and called for police investigation.
Police said the damage was most likely caused by rocks thrown at the building during the night but said the motive remained under investigation.
Rabbi Eli Levin, who leads Darchei Noam, said a heavy paving stone had been used to smash the window.
“This wasn’t children playing and a stone accidentally being thrown,” Levin told JTA.
The incident came just over a week after vandals broke into Kol HaNeshama, a prominent Reform synagogue in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood. In that occurrence, a group of youths smashed a window, entered the prayer hall, damaged artwork and tore down Pride flags displayed by the congregation. No worshippers were present at the time. Police opened an investigation but have not publicly announced any arrests.
“The smashing of the windows tonight at the Reform synagogue in the city is a serious act of vandalism and we will not let it pass without response,” Rochberger said, calling on police to thoroughly investigate the attack and bring those responsible to justice.
He added that Ramat Hasharon was committed to “freedom, tolerance, pluralism and coexistence” between religious and secular residents and said the city would not allow extremists to intimidate residents or damage the fabric of communal life.
“We will stand together against any attempt to harm the character of Ramat Hasharon and the values on which it is founded,” Rochberger said.
Democrats MK Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi who previously headed Israel’s Reform movement, linked the attack to recent violence against Reform congregations, businesses operating on Shabbat and anti-government protesters.
“They will smash and break – we will repair and build,” he wrote on X.
Darchei Noam was founded in Ramat Hasharon in 1981 and serves residents of that city, Herzliya and northern Tel Aviv. The congregation holds egalitarian services in which women and men participate equally and also runs educational programs, bar and bat mitzvah preparation and community volunteer activities, according to its website.
The congregation spent years fighting for the right to build a permanent synagogue. After the municipality declined to allocate land to a non-Orthodox congregation, the dispute ultimately reached Israel’s High Court of Justice, which ruled that the community could receive a plot.
Darchei Noam said it would hold its regular Friday night service as planned and called on supporters to attend in a show of solidarity following the attack.
“We will continue and we will not be deterred,” Levin said. “We will continue to hold egalitarian ceremonies and celebrate the holidays in our Jewish-Israeli way.”
The incident came as Ramat Hasharon and nearby Herzliya have been locked in disputes over businesses operating on Shabbat. In June, a Tel Aviv court dismissed a petition seeking to force the Ramat Hasharon municipality to enforce its existing Shabbat closure bylaw at the BIG Fashion Glilot shopping complex after the city pledged to apply the law under a new enforcement policy.
The municipality has simultaneously sought Interior Ministry approval to amend the decades-old bylaw to permit businesses to open on Saturdays in designated areas. Rochberger has repeatedly defended that effort, saying Ramat Hasharon should remain pluralistic and protect both freedom of religion and freedom from religion.
Just a few hundred meters away from the synagogue, businesses in the Neve Israel neighborhood of Herzliya have repeatedly been vandalized after opening on Shabbat. The local Othello ice cream shop was attacked three times before its owners stopped opening on Saturdays, citing safety concerns, while the windows of the nearby Pasta Basta restaurant were smashed in late July. Pasta Basta continued operating on Shabbat.
Herzliya Mayor Yariv Fisher has urged residents to support businesses that remained open on Saturdays.
“This will only spur me to keep working day and night to ensure that Herzliya remains a beacon of liberalism,” Fisher wrote on Facebook. “I invite the public to support all the city’s restaurants, entertainment businesses and cafes.”
Jerusalem has seen a parallel fight over Shabbat commerce in recent weeks. Cafe Basimta, near the Mahane Yehuda market, has faced weekly demonstrations by haredi Orthodox protesters since early July over its decision to remain open on Saturdays. Police have been deployed repeatedly at the site as protesters and counterprotesters faced off. A 75-year-old woman was arrested this month on suspicion of repeatedly vandalizing the cafe by damaging its lock and throwing garbage at the premises.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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