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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 Central Synagogue attack had no clear connection to Mamdani. He’s still being blamed.
A stabbing outside a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Dozens of swastikas painted on a Brooklyn playground. A Queens synagogue desecrated with feces and motor oil.
Combined with an unprecedented call by New York’s mayor to protest Israel’s prime minister, the recent rash of crimes against Jews in New York City has the community on edge.
So after Larry Montes, 46, was charged with hate crimes for attempting to disrupt Central Synagogue’s Friday night Shabbat service, striking a congregant and spitting on a security guard, many online rushed to blame Mayor Zohran Mamdani for his rhetoric against Israel. The incident seemed to fit into the political narrative held among Mamdani’s fiercest critics.
“The attack at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue is a direct result of Mayor Mamdani’s sustained campaign of incitement,” Ofir Akunis, consul general of Israel in New York, posted to X Saturday morning. “I warned that words would turn into actions, and that is exactly what is happening.”
The details that have emerged about Montes complicate that conclusion. A Forward analysis of the attacker’s social media and statements from his family paint a very different picture of Montes: a pro-Israel Republican who wanted to convert to Judaism.
In June, Montes reposted two videos critical of Mamdani: one comparing the mayor to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and another accusing Mamdani of having “betrayed” the city’s Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. In 2024, Montes posted a photo of the map of Israel with text overlaid that says, “Keep Israel in your heart.” He also reposted a video featuring Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi explaining why evangelical Christians support Israel.
If anything, Montes may have believed that the Reform congregation was too progressive. After his arrest, Montes called the congregants “fake Jews” in statements to the police, according to the assistant district attorney on the case, Ali Fazal.
Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said in an interview that the suspect appeared to have a “a deeply, frankly, disturbing worldview when it came to Jews that was simultaneously both philosemitic and antisemitic.” Conflating the suspect’s worldview with Mamdani’s, she added, “harms the fight against antisemitism.”
Online influencers place the blame on Mamdani
The attacker’s background and stance on Israel didn’t stop influencers and longstanding critics of Mamdani from piling on. “Do you think your non-stop demonization of Jews could have anything to do with it?” said Brianna Wu, an activist who has become a vocal critic of the progressive left, on X in response to Mamdani’s condemnation of the attack.
“It’s your fault Mr. Mayor,” Loay Alshareef, an activist who advocates for the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel, posted to X on the night of the attack. “You allowed this to happen.”
Others didn’t name Mamdani but quickly attributed the attack to increasing animus toward Zionists — even as the attacker’s social media suggests he was Zionist himself.
“American politics has become so obsessively antagonistic toward ‘Zionists’ that even a synagogue is seen as fair game for disruption and desecration,” said U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, on X.
Why exactly Montes attacked one of New York’s iconic synagogues is still unclear. Montes’ aunt, Myriam Montes, told the New York Post he was “mentally traumatized” because of his desire to be Jewish — suggesting he may have wanted to convert to Judaism but was rebuffed.
Mental health may also have been a factor. Montes was arrested three times for violent robberies between 2019 and 2023, police said, and he was a known “emotionally disturbed person.”
Some have argued that outsized attention on Israel can make Jews a natural target especially for people in the throes of a mental health crisis.
Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York political consultant, said the suspects’ anti-Mamdani views don’t weaken the case against the mayor. “There are crazy people that take cues from what they hear and what they read,” Sheinkopf said.
Spitalnick disagreed. “There are absolutely things the mayor has done that further reinforce concerns about Jewish safety,” she said. At the same time, “it’s disingenuous and unhelpful to blame him for all antisemitism in New York, which long predates him and which, as the evidence in this specific incident shows, is far more complicated than that.”
All that’s to say Montes could have had any number of motives for attacking a congregant during Shabbat services, including but not limited to warped philosemitism, a mental health crisis and prejudice against Reform Jews.
Playing into Netanyahu’s campaign
Blaming hatred of Israel and local political rhetoric for the attack could have an ulterior motive and political consequences halfway around the world. As Netanyahu and the ruling Likud Party, of which Israeli Consul General Akunis is a member, face a tough reelection fight in the Israeli Knesset elections in October, Mamdani has become a campaign target.
Last month, Netanyahu incorporated Mamdani’s video address encouraging New Yorkers to protest the Israeli leader into his own political campaign. In a campaign clip, he portrayed Mamdani as the face of a worldwide surge of antisemitism directed at Israel. Mamdani had initially threatened to arrest Netanyahu in September when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly, but the city’s legal department determined the mayor did not have the authority to do so.
Footage of Mamdani’s call to protest has now expanded to billboards and digital clips to rally Israeli voters on the right.
“They want Netanyahu to lose,” the new Likud campaign reads, placing Mamdani alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem. “Don’t let them win.”
The political logic is straightforward. Portray Mamdani as the symbol of a hostile movement against Israel. Cast Netanyahu’s political survival as part of the larger fight against international efforts to isolate the Jewish state.
Both Spitalnick and Sheinkopf facetiously called Mamdani’s pledge to arrest Netanyahu an “in-kind contribution” to the Netanyahu campaign. Spitalnick said the Israeli leader “thrives by being able to point to that as opposed to talking about his own policies and record.”
Jewish leaders and local politicians have called for lowering the temperature. Micah Lasher, the Democratic nominee for the 12th congressional district that includes Central Synagogue, told The New York Times after the attack that the political climate must be taken into consideration at a time like this.
“You can’t divorce the dramatic increase in violence targeted at the Jewish community,” he said, “from the political climate and the tone and tenor of the discourse around Jews and Israel.”
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‘We are in a time of biblical proportions’: What survivors of past shul attacks want Central Synagogue to know
When Audrey Glickman heard about the Friday night attack at Central Synagogue, a prominent congregation on Manhattan’s East Side, she had a visceral, immediate reaction.
“My first thought with anything like this is: they’ve been invaded,” she said. “And I know how that feels.”
Glickman, 69, survived the October 2018 attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue — the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history that killed 11 worshippers. She was leading services when she heard the rat-a-tat of gunfire. She grabbed fellow congregant Joe Charny, then 88, and raced up the stairs into a small room filled with bags of clothes to be donated to those in need. Together, huddled and scared, they hid under their prayer shawls until it was over.
In New York City this weekend, an attacker struck a congregant and a security guard, then was arrested and charged with hate crimes. Police said no one was seriously hurt.
“You never shake that feeling that somebody came into your space and invaded your safety, and you can’t undo it,” Glickman said. “My heart goes out to them.”
The suspect in New York, Larry Montes, 46, was charged with felony hate crimes and told police afterward that the attack was religiously motivated, citing hostility toward Jews and Black people. Montes, who has two prior misdemeanors, was granted bail at his Saturday night arraignment and is due back in court Thursday.
The attack landed amid a citywide surge: New NYPD data shows anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York rose 8.5% during Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first seven months in office and made up 57% of hate crimes citywide, with July alone seeing a 53% jump from a year earlier.
Glickman said she hopes New York officials can eventually give the congregation answers. A federal jury sentenced the Tree of Life gunman, Robert Bowers, to death in August 2023.
“I hope they have the kind of investigators that we had here to figure out what went on,” she said. “When you can close up the case, it feels a lot better.”
But Glickman said every targeted congregation eventually has to answer a harder question: How do you stay open to strangers, newcomers and the unaffiliated, while keeping the people inside safe?
For that answer, she said, members of Tree of Life turned to a friend: the Rev. Eric Manning of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a gunman killed nine Black worshippers during a Bible study in 2015.
Manning and then-Tree of Life’s Rabbi Jeffrey Myers leaned on each other. Myers invited Manning to speak at the funeral of Rose Mallinger, the oldest of the shooting victims, and the two clergy have stayed close in the years since. Manning’s advice to Glickman’s congregation has stayed with her: “You can’t close your doors.”
Nearly eight years later, Glickman still goes to shul most mornings, and still worships on Shabbat with Tree of Life, which continues to meet in borrowed space while its building is rebuilt.
Her message for the congregation in Manhattan: “We’re here, and we know how they feel,” Glickman said. “It’s not a good feeling, and we shouldn’t have to live with this. We are in a time of biblical proportions.”
‘The walls will never be high enough’
Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, 50, has an unusually direct connection to Central Synagogue. In January 2022, a gunman held Cytron-Walker and three congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, after Cytron-Walker let him in from the cold and offered him tea.
The gunman, Malik Akram, had done his research, the FBI later found: He’d chosen the synagogue because it was the closest one to the federal prison holding Aafia Siddiqui, sentenced to 86 years for attempted murder and other felonies. Akram demanded her release and ordered Cytron-Walker to get America’s equivalent of a chief rabbi on the phone. He’d seen photos of Central Synagogue’s senior rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, with President Barack Obama and insisted that Cytron-Walker call her.
Cytron-Walker didn’t know her personally; he tracked down a number and left her a voicemail.
The 11-hour standoff — caught in its entirety on the synagogue’s security cameras — ended with all the hostages escaping unharmed. Authorities shot and killed Akram on the scene.
“While it was sad to hear that there was an attack at Rabbi Buchdahl’s congregation, I was very grateful to hear that the security protocols they have in place minimized any disruption,” Cytron-Walker said.
He was struck by how quickly the congregation returned to prayer. “You always have to weigh, when there’s a disruption, what the community needs in that moment,” he said. “What the community needed was not to let what turns out to be a minor incident ruin the night — to be able to celebrate Shabbat as a community despite the disruption.”
Cytron-Walker, now the spiritual leader of Temple Emanuel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said Jewish congregations have to hold two values at once. “We have to live our values of loving the stranger,” he said. “Judaism has always been a part of the world, even when we try to isolate ourselves from it. The walls will never be high enough.”
At the same time, he said, “it is also a Jewish value to protect our own lives, to value our own lives. We should employ that with the rational part of our brain, not the emotional part. We shouldn’t panic, but we should be prepared.”
Just like Glickman, Cytron-Walker said he hopes Central Synagogue receives the kind of support that helped his own congregation heal.
“The Jewish people are not only receiving hate,” he said. “We’re also receiving love and support. It may not always be as much as we want, and when we do receive it, let’s offer gratitude and allow that to help with our healing.”
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On my first Shabbat in NYC, the sanctuary was attacked
I don’t often go to synagogue. Outside of the High Holidays, it is not somewhere I would ordinarily find myself on a Friday night.
In the last few years, I have made a point of spending Shabbat with my grandmother. We light candles, eat together and let the week recede for a few hours. I don’t see it as an obligation so much as the comfort of doing something that has been done before, by people I love, in a rhythm that existed long before I did.
And yet, synagogues have a strange way of finding me when I need them.
Last summer, while travelling through Europe to visit two of my closest friends, I found myself in London, exhausted from weeks of constant movement. I happened to walk past a synagogue and realized that Shabbat was the following day. I reached out and asked if I could join their services. I remember thinking that perhaps this was exactly what I needed: a few hours to sit still, focus, and breathe.
And I was right.
There is something uniquely grounding about entering a synagogue in an unfamiliar place and discovering that the ritual is familiar. You may be thousands of miles from home, surrounded by people you’ve never met, but you know when to stand. You recognize the melodies. You open the same prayers. You know that somewhere else in the world, other Jews are doing some version of the same thing.
So when, only a few days after moving to New York, I was connected with a member of Central Synagogue through a potential landlord and they invited me to join them for Shabbat services, I thought: Why not?
I had just arrived in a city where I was beginning a new job at the Forward, a new life, one that, for the first time, was entirely mine to shape. That is a daunting task. What better way to spend my first Friday night than doing something that has always made the unknown feel a little more manageable.
Moments after services began, I was sitting in the sanctuary, allowing myself to take in the week that had just passed — my first week in New York — when a man entered and began moving violently through the congregation.
He knocked down the Shabbat candles that had just been lit. He moved through the rows of congregants. I watched him strike another person.
People around me ran toward the sides of the sanctuary. My own body went into the same instinctive state of shock and survival: Where is the danger? Where can I go? What do I need to watch for?
The security response was swift. The intruder was stopped, we re-lit the candles, and services continued.
Those around me who knew I was new to the synagogue immediately went into protection mode. They checked on me, expressing disbelief that something like this could have happened there, especially given the level of security they pride themselves on maintaining. They told me that in the nearly three years since October 7, nothing like this had happened.
The clergy, too, seemed to understand what the moment required. They gave us strength and courage, using the same voices that had moments earlier been leading us in song and prayer to restore some sense of calm. Throughout the service and again afterward in their online response, they returned to the same idea: it was our duty to keep joy alive.
Joy, one of the rabbis said, is itself an act of resistance.
I understood the sentiment. But my body hadn’t quite caught up.
Shabbat is one of the rare times when I allow myself to become completely uninhibited. I sing. I look up from the prayer book. I watch the rabbis and the people around me. I let myself become absorbed in something larger than whatever has been occupying my mind that week. For a few hours, I am not thinking about work, or apartment hunting, or navigating a new city. I am simply there.
That is also why the disruption was so jarring. I had come to Shabbat to let my guard down, and suddenly I found myself unable to do so.
I kept my eyes toward the front of the room, watching for movement. When it came time to turn around during Lecha Dodi, I felt a jolt of anxiety at the thought of putting my back toward the congregation. I could no longer surrender myself completely to the moment and what it required of me. I knew, rationally, that the threat had passed. But my body had learned something different: that even here, even now, even in this room, I might need to be ready.
For a moment, I considered leaving. But the people around me seemed to embody a quiet confidence that everything was going to be okay. They had chosen to stay, and I followed their lead. There is a certain strength in knowing that you are not standing alone.
I had come to Central Synagogue because I wanted to feel at home in my new city. Instead, on my first Shabbat in New York, I was reminded how quickly the simple act of practicing Judaism can become an exercise in vigilance. And yet, looking around the room that evening, I also understood that vigilance does not have to mean retreat.
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