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August 3, 2001/Av 14, 5761, Vol. 53, No.43
Flickers of Jewish life glow in modern Italy
PAULA AMANN
Washington Jewish Week
Turin's Silvia Sacerdote explains how the ark of the original ghetto synagogue was repainted in black to memorialize King Carlo Alberto, who abolished the ghetto in 1848 and died the next year.
Photo by Paula Amann |
Shunted into dank ghettos, barred from most work, persecuted and sometimes killed for their way of life, Italian Jews spent much of the last millennium prey to forces beyond their control. Today, free and proud, they face an uncertain future, as their numbers dwindle.
The names of Italian Jews reflect their roots, their loyalties, their wanderings. Scratched on the walls of Rome's Jewish catacombs are names borrowed from Hebrew, but with a Latinate spin: Aster for Esther, Justus for Tzadik. Over their precarious history, Jews have also taken the first names of their protectors: Cesare for Emperor Julius Caesar, Vittorio Emanuele, the king who brought a republic with civil rights to Italy.
Last names of long-established Italian families often echo the towns they hailed from: Guastalla, Di Castro, Urbino. Others tell of origins in Spain, Portugal and France as well as 20th century arrivals from Central and Eastern Europe.
In raw statistics, Jews are a puddle when placed beside the greater Italian sea. Numbering 29,600, according to the American Jewish Year Book, they comprise just 0.05 percent of the country's total population. In many places, however, they seem to make up in activity what they lack in numbers.
A 10-day press tour of Italy last month, sponsored by ItalyItaly magazine, offered a window into Jewish life there.
On a balmy Friday evening in early June, well-dressed worshippers pack the carved wooden pews of Rome's Great Synagogue. Yet many appear to be tourists, rather than natives.
Outside the domed sanctuary decked in the floral designs of Art Nouveau, a uniformed carabiniere keeps guard, as has been the case since 1982, when terrorists targeted the building during the Lebanon War.
Roughly 15,000 Jews make their homes in the capital. Neither Ashkenazic nor Sephardic, they call themselves Romanim, says Laura Supino, a local architect and amateur historian. That's because Jews trace their Roman roots back to the second century B.C.E., well before the larger Jewish Diaspora.
The Romanim keep their own traditions. They have their own way of pronouncing Hebrew, throwing an extra "ng" sound into vowels. Like Sephardim, at Passover, they eat not only matzo, but rice.
In addition to the Great Synagogue, Rome has nine other congregations, all Orthodox, which, like other local institutions, are funded by a voluntary tax on the city's Jews. One thousand children attend the community's school, which runs from kindergarten to 12th grade. The Eternal City also has its own small yeshiva, which serves to ordain Italian rabbis.
The Great Synagogue itself stands at the edge of what once was the ghetto, an overcrowded enclave where a 1555 papal fiat forced Jews to live until 1870, when a new secular government emancipated them.
Today, this symbol of oppression has turned trendy and many Roman Jews make their homes among its narrow streets.
At the edge of the former ghetto, part of the Great Synagogue houses the Jewish Museum of Rome, which features a rotating collection of Torah covers in rich fabrics. The community is busy planning a renovation and expansion of the museum.
Zip north along the Ligurian Sea and you'll find yourself in the gritty port city of Livorno, with a different Jewish past and present.
Here no ghetto ever stood. Thanks to Tuscan Grand Duke Ferdinand I, who put out the welcome mat for conversos from Spain and Portugal in 1593, a vibrant Jewish community existed here for centuries.
Today, economically driven migration and intermarriage has made inroads into a population that numbered 5,000 in 1800 and about 2,000 before the passage of the infamous Racial Laws in 1938. Just 700 remain.
Yet Livorno's Jews reaped the rewards of interethnic harmony during the perilous period of the 1940s. The invading Germans only managed to deport about 120 people. The rest fled or found refuge with area Catholics.
Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Samuel Sondak, who came to work at the nearby NATO base in 1957 and retired here, recalls a chance remark of the nurse who cared for his son after the brit. She had, it seems, harbored Jews in her cellar when the Nazis came.
Allied bombers leveled the ornate synagogue and a modern replacement was erected in 1962. There the community gathers for twice-weekly minyanim, Shabbat and holidays.
To the north and west, the mid-sized city of Bologna holds sway as Europe's premier university town - an honor gained with Jewish involvement. As far back as 1466, Bologna University established a chair of Hebrew.
Like most of Italy's Jews, however, the Bolognese were herded into a ghetto after the egregious papal bull of 1555, only to be expelled altogether from the city 38 years later. They fanned out to three ghettos in the region: Cento, Lugo and Ferrara.
In the ghettos, church authorities locked the gates each night and curbed Jewish contact with the Christian world to a few trades: medicine, money lending and selling rags.
Not until Napoleon marched, albeit briefly, into Bologna in 1796, could area Jews breathe freely again. Full emancipation had to wait until the city's uprising against papal rule in 1859.
The dark curtain of oppression descended once more with imposition of the 1938 Racial Laws.
A Bolognese attorney, who like so many others, was expelled from his profession, took up the cause of Jewish refugees. Mario Finzi helped organize the care and education of 100 Jewish orphans in nearby Nonantola. All but one of the children made it through the war, with the aid of local citizens, but Finzi died in Auschwitz.
In another effort, municipal leaders in Bologna joined forces with the Jewish community and local scholars to create their own Jewish historical museum. Launched just two years ago, the institution stands inside the city's former ghetto.
Midway between Turin and Milan in Italy's northwest Piedmont region stands the small city of Casale Monferrato, which holds a small jewel of a synagogue, in a colorful baroque style verging on rococo.
"Our community is Orthodox in tradition, Reform in way of life," says resident Adriana Ottolenghi. "We don't even have a minyan (locally).
"One year for Yom Kippur, since the number of men is a problem, we had men from Australia, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Greece," said Ottolenghi. "It was a very cosmopolitan minyan."
Ottolenghi, a University of Wisconsin-trained journalist, now serves as de facto manager of the small but vibrant Jewish museum in a labyrinth of rooms adjoining the sanctuary.
Nearby, in Torino, a thriving community of some 1,100 Jews remains in the Piedmont region. The heart of the community is an imposing 1880 synagogue, with mosque-like turrets and three different worship spaces.
The top level houses festival celebrations, the sunken sanctuary below is home to the weekly Shabbat services, and the smallest space displays an ark from the original ghetto synagogue. Its ornate decorations, repainted in black and gold, honor King Carlo Alberto who in 1848 abolished the ghetto, only to die the following year.
Torino's Jews have their roots in 15th century migrations from Inquisition-era Spain by way of France. For a couple of centuries, they eked out an existence under the dukes and kings of Savoy. Barred from owning real estate, serving in the military, joining a trade or craft guild and attending schools, the Jewish population, compelled to wear a yellow mark on their clothing, were permitted to work as pawnbrokers and reweavers.
The city's ghetto was jammed into two blocks of buildings in 1639 and today the original gates still stand, although local shopkeepers seem to know little of their neighborhood's oppressive history.
Just this year, Italy, like several other European countries, held an official Giorno della Memoria ("Day of Memory") on Jan. 27 to mark the Shoah. The observance stemmed from legislation introduced by Bolognese Italian deputy Furio Colombo, who is married to a Jewish women, Mirta Coen.
In Ferrara, once home to the famous Finzi-Contini clan, local Jews have established yet another museum. After its opening five years ago, Jewish community president Gianpaolo Minerbi approached the town's archbishop about transferring the oversize iron keys to the former ghetto from the cathedral museum to the new institution.
The prelate consented and Minerbi became the only Jew to cross Ferrara's spacious piazza with these weighty objects in hand. They now are on display at the Jewish museum inside their own labeled glass case.
But the keys, the archbishop emphasized, are only on loan, Minerbi said.
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