Out of Sight

The island of Sicily has been inhabited since the dawn of written history, its own past one of constant conquests and reconquests. The Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Muslims, and many other nations and cultures fought over it throughout the centuries — and through it all, Jews maintained a continuous presence since Talmudic times. While Jews were also brought to Sicily as slaves after the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, one thing is for sure: Despite their harsh beginnings, they flourished and built more than 50 Jewish communities on the island, along with shuls, mikvaos, and cemeteries.

There is little written history about Jewish Sicily, but things weren’t always easy. We know, for example, that in the year 598 Pope Gregory V issued a papal order to the island’s bishop demanding protection for the Jews from persecution, death and forced conversions.

And so it went, until the final expulsion in 1492. Actually, the 40,000 Jews who lived on the island managed to postpone the decree until January of 1493, because of the severe harm that their departure would cause the economy and society. But in the end — with the exception of those who converted to Christianity as a result of the edict and were then persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition’s Sicilian branch — they made their way to the boats and fled with the few things they could hold in their hands, never to come back again. Fifteen centuries of Jewish presence in Sicily came to a screeching halt.

(One of the tragic ironies is that, some 40 years before they were expelled on the orders of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who controlled southern Italy, Jews in some of the communities asked permission to leave for Eretz Yisrael, but were refused. The Jews were considered “servants of the royal chamber,” many were arrested, and the authorities planned to confiscate their property and sell them as slaves. That episode ended with the payment of a huge ransom of gold.)

Although many of the Jews fled, close to half pretended to convert to Christianity while holding on to Jewish life in secret. Generation after generation, certain traditions were maintained, although after time, their meaning was often lost.

Secrets

Yet one person who has reconnected to the mystery of his past is Baruch Triolo, a vintner and hotelier and head of a reemerging Jewish community in the town of Catania. Baruch knew we had come for the bris and he welcomed us into his fairytale hotel in the middle of a sprawling vineyard, just a ten-minute walk from the sea.

Baruch (who prefers to use the Hebrew version of his Italian name Benito) was born in Catania and grew up in an old neighborhood in the city called the Giudecca, unaware that the Giudecca was actually the Jewish quarter of old, whose meaning had long been forgotten. He knew that his neighbors and friends were somehow a little different than many people in the city, but never gave it much thought.

“I went to church when I had to,” he says, “but from the time I was little, I noticed how my mother and grandmother would speak in hushed tones, and sometimes performed certain actions that nobody else seemed to do. I knew that every Friday before sunset, my mother and grandmother would each light two candles, and when I finally asked them about it, they shared their secrets. They told me that they were Jewish and their family had been living in secret, passing down rituals from generation to generation, for 500 years.”

Baruch learned that the descendants of the Jews who had converted were never really considered true Christians, and many were suspected of being “giudaizzanti” — Jewish sympathizers — and were kept under surveillance as to whether, for example, they lit candles on Friday evening.

Baruch says there are many locals just like him. About 40 years ago, one of these crypto-Jews in a different town began to teach about their Jewish roots, and a small cadre of young people began to meet and learn about Judaism. (Some have even undergone halachic conversions.) Those revelations about his past lit a fire in Baruch’s heart and he was soon identifying as a Jew, taking upon himself to begin rebuilding the community of Catania. He approached the city council and asked for a building for a shul. They gave him the top floor of a city-owned ancient castle, and now there is a small synagogue in the city.

Crushed and Trampled

The Italians have been growing grapes and pressing wine from the times of Kings David and Shlomo, and Baruch’s estate was once a vineyard, with one of the buildings still housing the original grape pressing vats that were tended by local workers, who in centuries past would stomp on the grapes with their feet in small tubs or basins. From this building, a river of wine flowed underground to another building that housed the huge wooden barrels where the wine was stored. As recently as the 1970s, 200 workers would toil and produce hundreds of thousands of bottles of wine.

While not adhering to kashrus himself, Baruch keeps a closed cabinet with kosher dishes and pots and pans in his hotel kitchen. After kashering the stove and lighting the fires, we let the chef make us a dinner of Sicilian recipes using homemade olive oil from Baruch’s own trees and salads with leaves grown on the grounds. Baruch even brought out kosher Italian wine to make the feast special.

Over an authentic Sicilian repast, Baruch gave us a bit of history, explaining how, during the Inquisition, about half of the Jewish population remained on the island and “converted” to Christianity. But as in each of the lands where the Inquisition’s long arm reached, many became Christian in name only yet continued to practice Judaism in secret. Today we know them as anusim — forced converts, or the more derogatory term, Marrano, which means “pig.” The Portuguese called them “Cristão-novo,” or “New Christians,” and indeed, the local Christians in Sicily had a unique name for them: the Neofiti (“newly converted” in Greek).

In fact, he believes the number of Sicilians of Jewish origin could be as high as 25 percent of the population of five million.

Given that fact, we wondered what our reception would be like as we walked around with our yarmulkes, given all the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bad press, and especially as one of last summer’s Gaza flotilla boats set sail from the island. Yet despite the hullabaloo in the media, we saw only one anti-Israel sign and one house with a Palestinian flag. Yet we were treated graciously, perhaps because of Baruch, who has become the go-to guy when dealing with the community, and is often interviewed by the island’s news media.

We were amazed by his resilience and the energy he has invested in bringing this community back to its roots, even if most of these zera Yisrael are not halachically Jewish. I asked him if he had been afraid years ago, that by publicly declaring his identity, he might have caused problems for himself.

“Sometimes a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” he said.

Eruption Overhead

When we initially flew over the island, we saw Mount Etna, just outside Catania, belching smoke. Etna is the largest volcano in Italy and one of the world’s most active volcanos, erupting many times a year. In fact, just a few months before our arrival, a large flow of lava erupted, sending a cloud of ash nine kilometers up into the sky, affecting aviation in Europe.

While I’ve seen volcanos before, it was still exciting to drive up toward the top of the mountain and see the smoke being piped up the vent and out of the crater of the top of the mountain. We could see very clearly where the pyroclastic flow of lava had been just recently, as any trees that had been in its way had been burnt up, the lava flow leaving behind a trail of cooled black volcanic stone running through the trees down the mountain.

Volcanic eruptions are amazing natural phenomena. And like other natural events like rainbows, thunder, lightning, shooting stars and earthquakes, the common denominator is that they remind us that Hashem is pulling the strings behind the perfectly orchestrated show we call nature, revealing a tiny fraction of His omnipotent might. Therefore, the brachah “His strength and might fills the world” (the same brachah we make on thunder) is made by someone who is actually witnessing a live eruption. When Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines roared to life in the summer of 1991and destroyed the US Clark Air Base, the Lubavitcher Rebbe commented on the spiritual aspects of volcanos. At a farbrengen, the Rebbe discussed this brachah and its spiritual effect, speaking at length about the power of a Jew’s brachah: “Recently, there has been a volcanic eruption in a remote corner of the world; those few Jews who witnessed the event and made the blessing of ‘…His strength and might fills the world’ used the effect of the volcanic eruption to bring G‑dliness to the entire world. And these sentiments are certainly felt in the United States, whose servicemen have been involved in the relief efforts there.”

So it was with these lofty thoughts that we davened Minchah at the top of Mt. Etna, a good preparation for our short trip to nearby Syracuse for the bris — the main event on our agenda.

Buried Treasure

The bris was a major Jewish affair. Family members flew in from Eretz Yisrael, and the young parents even flew in a kosher caterer. I even met an Israeli fellow who lives in Sicily and grows sesame seeds. And he recognized me immediately. “Hey, Dr. Greenspan!” he called out, smiling from ear to ear. “I haven’t seen you since you were my dentist when I was ten!”

Yet there was one thing that stumped me: Because there was a certain question about the baby’s yichus, it was determined that, to avoid all questions, a beis din would officially convert the baby so there would be no doubts as to his Jewishness. We had the beis din — myself, Rabbi Birnbaum, and Rabbi Moscati, who had arrived from Naples.

But where would we find a mikveh in Sicily, which has not seen a Jewish community in five centuries?

The answer is amazing and the serendipity astounding. In the 1980s a woman named Amalia Daniele bought a building in the old Jewish quarter, on what was called the Via Della Giudecca, the Road of the Jews. The neighborhood was in great disrepair, people threw their garbage out in the street and tourism was nonexistent, yet she wanted to restore that particular building and turn it into a small hotel.

As the workers began to rebuild the foundations, upon which a church had been built, they discovered a staircase going down into a huge vault, that had been filled to the brim with dirt and garbage. It took 150 dump trucks to remove all the dirt so that the staircase and basement hollow could be excavated; what they found was an ancient underground chamber with several separate pools, each of which had a set of stairs going down into them. And as much as they tried to clean those chambers out, they were constantly being refilled with clean water. This was an ancient mikveh, with water filling up the pools automatically from a natural underground spring!

Imagine, an underground water source was still filling these little baths with water. As this was the old Jewish neighborhood, Amalia had been learning about Judaism and realized she’d stumbled on a ritual bath. She brought in some Jewish experts from Rome, who determined that these were, indeed, very, very old mikvaos, the oldest in all of Europe, dating to the fifth century.

Standing there as part of the beis din, as Noy immersed her baby in this ancient sacred bath, it was an electric moment for me. After performing the bris, I was approached by Rabbi Moscati, who added to the festivities as he sang the unique Italian bris milah tunes. “Do you realize how important this brit is?” he said to me. He explained that since the dissolution of the Papal States and the reunification of Italy along with the technical dissolution of the Inquisition in 1870, there have been no Jewish communities south of Naples.

“This is the first brit milah in Sicily in 500 years!” he said with palpable excitement. “This community comeback, this longing for an ancient connection that was never really severed, is incredible.”

But still, that leaves me wondering: There were over 50 communities on this island, and people left with just a small suitcase or duffel bag or whatever they could carry in their hands. So where are all the kiddush cups, the candlesticks, the sifrei Torah, the seforim and manuscripts, and so many other pieces of Judaica? Are they stashed away in some attics in the old Jewish quarter? Under the floorboards in some back bedroom? Maybe one day, we’ll find out. Until then, one thing is certain: The ancient memories can never be truly erased.

MOB SCENE

W

hile Sicily had no Jewish community for centuries, they did create a presence in Sicily’s major export: the Sicilian Mafia, the paradigm of organized crime. Originally called the Cosa Nostra (“our thing”), it started as a group of families that took control over their area running protection rackets and money laundering, and later moved into construction and drug and human trafficking. With the immigration to the US in the early 1900s of many Sicilians, the mob traveled with them. While the Cosa Nostra was controlling the streets, the Jews got in on the industry as well, calling themselves the “Kosher Nostra.”

The first decades of the 20th century were full of possibility, with Jewish thugs such as Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. They moved into racketeering, bootlegging, and narcotics. They also took control of the mushrooming labor unions, particularly the huge garment union, the truckers union, and the poultry union.

When I was a kid, my father was the rabbi of a small shul in the Catskills, and one day the shul president came over to our house. His name was Dr. Glick and he was a veterinarian and had just started working as a health inspector for the local kosher bird slaughterhouse. He was a traditional Jew and active in the community. He told my dad that he witnessed the head of the shochtim’s union demand $100 cash weekly from each shochet’s pay, which he then turned over to the Mafia protection racket. If they didn’t pay, they’d lose their jobs.

I remember one shochet, a Holocaust survivor named Rabbi Michaels. He was a very special Yid, who would give the devar Torah every Shabbos during Seudah Shlishis when I was a child. He had no kids — maybe they died during the war — and he and his wife were just hanging on with his minimal salary. Yet if he did not pay the bribe, he, too, would be out of a job.

It was Arnold Rothstein, a rich man’s son who taught the young, uneducated hoodlums of the Bowery how to have style. He used Jewish smarts to turn the thuggery into serious business. Lucky Luciano, who would go on to become a major boss within the Italian-American Mafia and organize New York’s Five Families, famously said that Arnold Rothstein “taught me how to dress.” The stereotypical image of the sharply dressed American mobster seen in films can be traced, at least in part, back to Rothstein himself.

Many of the gangsters were members of standing in synagogues and made significant donations to the State of Israel, especially during the War of Independence.

Meyer Lansky was a notorious figure in American organized crime, involved in illegal gambling, bootlegging, and tax evasion. Despite his criminal activities, he was a staunch supporter of Israel, contributing funds to the state and assisting in smuggling weapons to the Haganah before Israel’s independence in 1948. In 1970, facing prosecution for tax evasion in the United States, Lansky fled to Israel, hoping to gain automatic citizenship.

But his presence in Israel created a political crisis for Prime Minister Golda Meir’s government. The Israelis were concerned that granting refuge to a high-profile mobster, especially after the US demanded his extradition, would damage Israel’s international reputation and potentially allow organized crime to flourish within the country.

After a failed appeal, Lansky was deported back to the United States, where he was arrested upon landing in Miami. But perhaps he was rewarded for his good deeds in the end — he was only prosecuted for tax evasion and was eventually acquitted of all major charges or found too sick to stand trial. He lived the rest of his life in the retirement oasis of Miami Beach, where he passed away in 1983.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1092)