Palermo
is set to open a synagogue for the first time since 1492, when King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella of Spain issued an edict to expel Sicily’s Jews (whose population has been estimated at 25,000 by some historians). Over five hundred years after this mass exile, Palermo’s
Archbishop Corrado Lorefice has donated to the Jewish community an abandoned
church on the site of what was once the city’s opulent Renaissance synagogue. The church is on indefinite loan for use as a new synagogue and cultural center.
The
newly donated church is a seventeenth-century architectural gem, and its restoration to serve as Palermo's synagogue and cultural center is under the supervision of three longtime lay leaders in the Jewish community, Evelyne Aouate, Luciana
Pepi and Maria Antonietta Ancona. They
are poised to pick up a thread lost for centuries to the banishment and forced
conversion of Sicilian Jews.
I visited Evelyne and Luciana in the summer of 2017 after reading an article about them in The New York Times (Maria Antonietta Ancona happened to be away from Palermo that week). They were so extraordinarily generous to me that I felt as if I were the only one to have made the trip, until I learned that they had already received a wave of visitors responsive to their news coverage and had treated each one with the same Homeric hospitality.
By the time of
my visit, Palermo’s Jewish community had already officially received the little
church for use as the synagogue, handed over on January 12, the same date as
the final deadline for expulsion in 1493. Renovations
had not yet begun when I was there, however, and I had the privilege of seeing
the unfinished space, walking across the stone floor largely open and free of
furnishings, observing how the baroque architectural details had weathered time,
and following the dust particles in the Sicilian sunlight as it bounded through
the clerestory windows.
While the Palermo municipal government has promised some financial support for the structural restoration, the Jewish community must raise all the funds for completion of the interior, including an ark, Torah scrolls and a security system. The community views the synagogue as space welcoming to all in a great gesture of inter-religious reconciliation and harmony. They see it as a symbol of peace.
While the Palermo municipal government has promised some financial support for the structural restoration, the Jewish community must raise all the funds for completion of the interior, including an ark, Torah scrolls and a security system. The community views the synagogue as space welcoming to all in a great gesture of inter-religious reconciliation and harmony. They see it as a symbol of peace.
I
arrived in Sicily days before the filming of a special episode of the
national biweekly television program on Jewish life, Sorgente di vita [Spring of life], with special coverage of the
synagogue of Palermo, coordinated by the noted author Lia Tagliacozzo, and
prepared for broadcast to coincide with the Giornata Europea della Cultura
Ebraica [European Day of Jewish Culture], on September 10. With characteristic generosity, Luciana made
it possible for me to observe the taping of the show in the church.
There
I met Rabbi Pierpaolo Pinhas Punturello, the spiritual leader of the Jewish
community of Palermo. Rabbi Punturello
converted to Judaism after discovering his own Italian family’s Jewish roots. His spiritual leadership in Palermo is
provided by the organization Shavei Israel, which helps Bnei Anusim,
descendants of Jews forced to undergo conversion.
Before
the television camera, beneath the splendid seventeenth-century chandelier,
Rabbi Punturello told of a legend about the little church, called Santa Maria
del Sabato, Saint Mary of the Sabbath, an unusual name. It is said that in this church in the
seventeenth century, the congregants who were converted Jews met on Saturday
evenings to distribute alms to the poor – a ritual practice that many believe
was continuous with a longstanding Jewish tradition. Although this legend has not been proven with
reference to documents, it remains local lore.
While
the television crew was taping Rabbi Punturello, an American undergraduate
entered the back of the church, after having been sent over by the staff of the
Archivio Comunale [Archive of the City], where she had gone to look at a
display of Jewish documents. Among its
many collections, the Archivio has Jewish documents through the ages, including
the period of racial laws, instituted from 1938 to 1943 by Mussolini’s fascist
regime, which prohibited Jews from accessing higher education and practicing professions. The regime eventually perpetrated the mass
deportations of Jews in Italy and sent thousands to their deaths in
concentration camps.
The
undergraduate whom I met in Palermo was working, in a summer internship, for
an Italian organization that provides services to global refugees today, and
she was seeking a group with which to say Friday evening prayers. The rabbi connected her with Luciana, who, in
turn, invited her to a ceremony the following morning. I had to miss the ceremony to give a
conference talk across town at the University of Palermo, but I learned about
it later through articles by the journalist Tamara Zieve in The Jerusalem Post (cited below), as well as conversations with Luciana and Evelyne.
Luciana
told me that when the undergraduate arrived at the ceremony, she went pale upon
finding that The Raoul Wallenberg Foundation would be honoring Archbishop Lorefice
for conferring the church upon the Jewish community. The undergraduate’s own grandfather had been
among the thousands of Jews saved by Raoul Wallenberg through his position as a
Swedish diplomat in Hungary during World War II. If not for Raoul Wallenberg, this young woman
would never have existed.
When
Archbishop Lorefice received the award from the Wallenberg Foundation, he spoke
in terms of cultivating heart-warming friendships that enrich communities. Archbishop Lorefice also said that it was
fundamentally important to appreciate the roots of Christian identity in
Judaism. He has repeatedly said publicly,
“The Christian house must be the house of all people.” Also at the ceremony were leaders of
Palermo’s Muslim and Hindu communities. The
ceremony was a culmination of Archbishop Lorefice’s significant investment in
building inter-religious ties. He had attended
the Jewish community’s Passover Seder the previous spring, for example.
As
is not uncommon for descendants of converted Jews, Luciana learned that her
paternal grandmother had a Jewish surname, Bologna. Often a surname is the only indicator that
remains of a pre-conversion Jewish identity.
In some cases, families have carried on Jewish rituals, such as Friday evening
candle lighting, even while living a Catholic identity. As a professor of Hebrew Studies at the
University of Palermo, Luciana taught for many years an undergraduate course in
Jewish History, where every semester students said they had observed
unaccounted-for Jewish rituals in their own ostensibly Catholic homes, including,
for example, rites such as covering household mirrors in mourning the dead, as well as
dietary practices.
Luciana
is a magisterial scholar, with command of medieval philosophy, history,
manuscript studies, paleography, the Judeo-Arabic language in common use in
Sicily in the Middle Ages (which consists of Arabic written with Hebrew characters),
and Biblical, medieval and modern Hebrew. Whereas many historians in her field resort
to translators and linguists to decipher medieval texts, Luciana has developed
all the necessary expertise, herself.
She says that, in her doctoral program, when she first undertook research into
the Jewish intellectual component of the inter-religious coexistence in medieval
Sicily and dipped into Hebrew studies, she felt such a powerful
sense of recognition and homecoming that she was certain of her Jewish
identity. Luciana’s Judaism has been
challenging for a number of her Catholic family members to comprehend, although
her father has always been understanding.
For
years, Luciana and Evelyne have coordinated religious services, holiday
gatherings and lectures for Palermo’s Jewish community. Since 2013, Evelyne has organized an annual
ceremony to light Hanukah candles in what was the Spanish Inquisition’s dungeon
prison in Palermo, in Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri, where among the graffiti left
by desperate prisoners are messages in Hebrew. Also at Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri, which is now part of the University of Palermo, is a plaque to honor the Jewish faculty members expelled as a result of Mussolini's racial laws, including Emilio Segré, who went on to become a Nobel laureate in physics in 1959.
Evelyne, who serves as President of the Istituto Siciliano di Studi Ebraici [Sicilian Institute for Hebrew Studies], received an award from the Mayor of Palermo in November 2017 for her service to the community. A French-Algerian Jew, Evelyne originally became a palermitana through marriage. Now she has retired from the daily operation of her fashionable boutique in Palermo, which is carried on by her daughters. These days, she pauses to catch up with shopkeeper friends from around the globe as she walks through the Kalsa neighborhood, commonly referred to as Palermo’s Arab Quarter, on her way to the new synagogue building.
It
is widely believed that Sicily’s Jewish community began with the exodus after
the sack of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 C.E., famously
portrayed on the Arch of Titus in the Forum in Rome. In his definitive 800-page history of the
Jews in Sicily, Between Scylla and
Charybdis (2011) – an updated condensation of his 16-volume Magnum opus, The Jews in Sicily (1997) – Shlomo Simonsohn writes that the first
reference to the Palermo synagogue is a document of 598 C.E., which attests to
the fact that the then Archbishop despoiled the property, including a main
building, a guest house, and gardens; Pope Gregory I ordered that compensation
be made to the Jewish community for the destruction.
The
rabbi Ovadia di Bertinoro (1455-1516) described the marvelous Renaissance
synagogue in his travelogue of his 1487 sojourn in Palermo (the English
translation here is that of Shlomo Simonsohn, p. 252):
“…The
synagogue in Palermo has no equal in the country and among the nations, and
[everybody] praises it. In the outer
courtyard grow vines on stone pillars.
They have no equal: I measured one vine five palms thick. From there a stone stairway leads to the
court[yard] before the synagogue, surrounded by a portico on three sides,
equipped with chairs for those who do not wish to enter the synagogue for one
reason or another. There is a fine and
beautiful well. On the fourth side there
is the portal of the synagogue. The
synagogue is square […]. Toward the east
end is the sanctuary, a pretty stone structure like a chapel. Because they will not put the scrolls of the
law in an aron [ark], [i]nstead they
put them in the sanctuary, on a wooden platform, with their housings and crowns
on top and silver finials and crystal on the columns. I was told that the silver, crystal and gold
embroidery in the sanctuary were worth 4,000 gold pieces. The sanctuary has two exits, south and
north. Two trustees from among the
community are in charge of the doors. In
the middle of the synagogue there is a wooden tower, the dais to which the hazzanim [cantors] ascend to pray. The community has hired five hazzanim. They pray on Sabbaths and Holidays with
pleasant voices and melodies. I have
never seen anything like it among Jews anywhere. But on weekdays few come to synagogue, a boy
may count them. There are many rooms
[grouped] around the synagogue, such as the room of the hospice with beds for
the sick and shelterless foreigners from distant lands; the miqwa [ritual bath]; the great and
beautiful room of the officers, where they sit in judgment and deliberate on
public affairs…”
This
world wonder was lost when the Jews were forced to sell the entire property at
an extortionately low price after the edict of expulsion in 1492.
Before
their exile, the Jews of Sicily represented an estimated 5% of the island's total population. They were engaged in every sector of the economy –
diplomacy, law, medicine, artisanal manufacturing, wine, cuisine, agriculture,
and importing, just to name a few. The
Jewish community had become so fundamental to the Sicilian economy that local
Christian leaders petitioned against expulsion, albeit unsuccessfully. All Jews were ordered to resolve all debts
before leaving. (Perhaps the analogue today would be if 25,000 New Yorkers were
required to pay their commercial commitments, education loans and mortgages
within a year.) The poorest had to find
the means to leave or face forced conversion.
Amidst
the property dispositions, Simonsohn describes a small number of documents that
attest in raw terms to the terror and misery that must have been
widespread. Whereas the wealthy and
powerful Samuel Sala agreed to convert to Christianity and took the name Paulo,
his pregnant wife, Asisa, and their 11-year-old son, Saduno, refused to
follow suit. By the time authorities
permitted their departure from Sicily, Asisa and Saduno had been imprisoned for
days and pressured to convert. As was
the common practice, the Spanish Viceroy ordered that, although the pregnant
Asisa was permitted to leave, when the fetus was born, an emissary at her
expense had to take the baby from her and bring the baby to live with the
father. The Church had ordered that a
Jewish couple had to separate if one spouse converted, and the fetus, when born
as a living child, had to be handed to the Christian spouse. Simonsohn says that the Sala family in
Trapani had been “familiars of the kings since the end of the fourteenth
century and in their service, chiefly as diplomats in relations with North
Africa” (p. 538).
More than five hundred years after the rending of Jewish families like that of Asisa and
Saduno, one evening during the summer of 2017, Evelyne received a call from a
man who said that he wanted to reestablish a synagogue for the Jewish community
in his own Italian town and was seeking advice.
In this way, Palermo’s example may well have a rippling effect in connecting
people through a shared lost cultural past.
When
Evelyne speaks of history’s repeating itself, what she has in mind is a return
to a pluralistic and cooperative coexistence, glimpsed at moments in Palermo’s
medieval Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities. Palermo’s new synagogue affords us the
opportunity to see evolving enriching inter-religious collaborations in the city
today.
Sources
Calimani,
Riccardo, Storia degli ebrei italiani,
vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 2013.
Ienna,
Daniele, “La nuova sinagoga parte di un percorso che era già scritto,” la Repubblica, September 9, 2017.
Povoledo,
Elisabetta, “500 Years After Expulsion, Sicily’s Jews Reclaim a Lost History,” The New York Times, April 24, 2017.
Psalm
84
Religiose
del Sacro Cuore di Gesù, “Consegnata una
MEDAGLIA WALLENBERG all’arcivescovo di Palermo, Corrado LOREFICE.”
http://www.rscjitalia.it/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=841:medaglia-al-vescovo-lorefice&catid=67&Itemid=95
“Shavei
Israel’s new emissary to Italian Bnei Anousim shares the story of his own journey
to Judaism and Israel,” Shavei Israel
-
https://shavei.org/shavei-israels-new-emissary-to-italian-bnei-anousim-shares-the-story-of-his-own-journey-to-judaism-and-israel/
(viewed October 6, 2017).
Simonsohn,
Shlomo, Between Scylla and Charybdis: The
Jews in Sicily, Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Sorgente di vita,
Rai.it, September 3, 2017.
Vitello,
Paul, “Scholars Reconsidering Italy’s Treatment of Jews in the Nazi Era,” The New York Times, November 4, 2010.
Zieve,
Tamara, “Resurgent Jewish community in Sicily to open first synagogue in 500
years,” The Jerusalem Post, January
10, 2017.
---,
“Top Catholic cleric in Palermo honored for returning ancient synagogue land to
Jews,” The Jerusalem Post, June 29,
2017.
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“Jewish World: Saviors of Italy’s Jewish past,” The Jerusalem Post, July 8, 2017.