In Syracuse, an Ancient Jewish Community Is Revived

Once home to some of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe—which were eradicated five centuries ago—Sicily is now experiencing a rebirth of Judaism. S. D’I. and Erasmus describe what has occurred in one Sicilian city:

In 1492, Sicily’s once-flourishing Jewish community was expelled by the Spanish monarchs that held sway over the island; some fled to the nearby kingdom of Naples but they were soon driven out of that realm, too, and duly headed eastward to the comparative safety of Ottoman territory.

Small wonder, then, that among the 40,000 or so Jews who now live in Italy, only a handful are to be found anywhere south of Rome. In locations like the Giudecca (Jewish quarter) of Syracuse, an ancient Sicilian port, place-names and Hebrew inscriptions are among the few obvious reminders that the religion of ancient Israel was once practiced here. . . . Before [the expulsion of] 1492, the port had twelve synagogues and 5,000 Jews; that faith and culture have been undergoing a modest but determined local revival, as some long-dormant collective memories come to the surface.

Some people date the rebirth to the discovery in Syracuse in 1987 of a mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath, which may be among the oldest in Europe. That was one of things which inspired Stefano Di Mauro, an Orthodox Sephardi rabbi who had spent most of his life in America, to return to his native Sicily in 2007. Now the synagogue he founded, which is housed in a nondescript building but boasts a canopy, can count on crowds of 50 people or more at festivals and rites of passage. For more routine weekly services, the worshippers often number twelve to fifteen, just about satisfying the minyan or quorum of ten men. . . .

Many of the faithful tell remarkable stories about the way they embraced Judaism because of half-remembered family traditions. In Jewish terms, the community members seem mostly to be Bnei Anusim, the “children of the forced [converts]”: in other words, descendants of those who [in 1492] converted at least superficially to Christianity as a way to avoid expulsion.

Read more at Economist

More about: Conversos, History & Ideas, Italian Jewry, Sicily

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society