Chabad now the Jewish face of Venice
RUTH ELLEN GRUBER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
At any given moment, there are probably far more Jewish tourists in Venice than the 400-some local Jews who live scattered around the lagoon city. One recent estimate said as many as 300,000 Jews visit each year.
Thousands of them make their way to the historic Venice Ghetto where, amid the picturesque canals and piazzas, a battle for the Jewish future of the city is being played out.
As elsewhere in Europe, this battle of style, ideology and ritual practice pits the worldwide Chabad movement, with its emphasis on outreach and high-profile public Jewish celebration, against a tiny local established Jewish community that is proud of its traditions and bent on preserving its own historic self-identity.
Jewish tourists are part of the equation. For Chabad, which began operation in Venice 14 years ago, they are prime targets for outreach. Chabad welcomes them with open arms on Shabbat and other holidays.
For the established community, the tourists are a transient fact of life and a source of income, as well as a source of congregants to make up a minyan each Shabbat. Even out of season, tourists often outnumber local Jews at synagogue services. But the tourists have little impact on the direction or development of established communal life, and the local Jewish community does not seek to involve them. Indeed, visitors knocking on the door of the Jewish community office in search of information or Shabbat hospitality may even feel themselves rebuffed.
"This is typical of Venice as a whole," says longtime Venice Jewish community member Aldo Izzo.
Jews have lived in Venice since medieval times.
In 1516 Venetian rulers confined the city's Jews to the area of today's ghetto, forming the world's first enclosed district where Jews were forced to live. The very word "ghetto" was born here, as the enclosed area had once been the site of a foundry, or "getto" in Venetian dialect.
The ghetto today is made up of five ornate synagogues, only one of which is in use, hidden behind the walls of tall, tenement-type dwelling houses. The Jewish museum is here, as well as a Holocaust memorial, a kosher pastry shop and several Jewish-run souvenir shops. The Jewish community also runs an old-age home in the ghetto, and the community offices are in a walk-up suite of rooms behind a simple door in a building housing one of the synagogues.
Despite all this, however, it is Chabad - the relative newcomer to the city - whose public face is most prominent and whose Jewish facilities are most accessible.
A cheery Chabad-run kosher restaurant, called Gam-Gam, offers Israeli and Italian specialties and free Shabbat meals. "In the tourist season, we can have as many as 400 to 500 people for Shabbos dinner. They sometimes eat in three shifts," says Shachar Banin, whose Italian-born husband, Ramy, became Venice's Chabad emissary in 1991.
At Sukkot, Chabad erects a public sukkah outside the restaurant and also on the Ghetto Novo. It also builds a sukkah on a boat and cruises the Venice canals. For Chanukah they put up a 25-foot public menorah, and also erect a menorah on a gondola and sail it around the canals.
This high-profile presence has led to tensions. Some years ago, complaints by non-Jewish neighbors about the yeshiva's noisy singing made newspaper headlines.
And many in the local Jewish community, feeling their role and identity usurped, bristle when Chabad activities, such as a newly opened Jewish kindergarten that competes with the local communal school, are referred to as projects of the "Venetian Jewish community."
Relations were so bad in 1996 that the board of the local community sent a letter to all community members as well as national Jewish organizations complaining about Banin's activities, accusing him of failing to respect the local community and its traditions and of trying to undermine or replace its activities.
Today, Chabad and the local Jewish community have established a truce. But frictions still exist beneath the surface.
There are still frictions, but it's mostly not out in the open, says Izzo.
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