The Italian Rabbi Who Survived the Holocaust Only to Convert to Catholicism

Born in Austrian Galicia in 1881, Israel Zolli (né Zoller) studied at the rabbinical seminary in Florence and later served as the rabbi of Trieste and then Rome. Although he authored a scholarly study of the New Testament, published in 1938, few of his congregants expected that he, along with his wife, would convert to Catholicism less than a decade later. Shalom Goldman writes:

Italian Jews had faced official discrimination beginning in 1938, but they were not threatened with extermination until German forces moved into Italy after Mussolini’s fall in 1943. When the Nazis [seized] Rome, Zolli and his family went into hiding with a Catholic family. The presidents of the synagogue and the community, however, expected Zolli to remain in public view, and they criticized the rabbi for shirking his leadership role. Zolli responded with the assertion that the Germans certainly would have killed him as soon as they found him, just as they had systematically killed the chief rabbis of other Italian cities. Regardless of the dangers Zolli and his family may have faced during the war, Zolli’s postwar critics considered his apostasy to be an act of retribution against a community that had criticized his behavior during the German occupation.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Catholicism, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Italian Jewry, World War II

 

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