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02/12/2008 Archived Entry: "Rabbi Barbara in Florida, I'm on CT radio (and the internet)"

You know I love Italy. And you know I’m Jewish and I love being Jewish. So, you coulda figured, as we might say in Brooklyn, that eventually I’d get more than casually interested in the history of the Jews in Italy, especially southern Italy.

In a way (okay, only in a tangential way), I am myself descended from Italian Jews. My paternal grandfather, Barney Schwartz, considered himself one because his parents, Joseph Schwartz and Adele Friedman, were both from what became the far northeast of Italy after World War I. Joseph was from a town called Gorizia, now divided between Italy and Slovenia. Adele was from Trieste. Of course, at the end of the nineteenth century, when my great-grandparents left their homeland for America, these cities were still part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The traditional food of Trieste is Austro-Hungarian, not anything we’d recognize as Italian. But you couldn’t tell that to my grandfather.

Anyways, as we might also say in Brooklyn, I have been dipping my toes into Jewish-Italian history at Roman and southern Italian archaeological sites, in Italian museums, by visiting synagogues and Jewish quarters in Italy, and reading. There’s not a huge amount to see, but enough: A Jewish trail from Sicily up to Rome.

Last summer in Calabria, I met my best Jewish-Italian contact yet. Rabbi Barbara Aiello is the only Reform rabbi – I think she says “Progressive” -- and the only woman rabbi, in Italy. She was born in Pittsburgh, and she became a rabbi as something like her third career. She studied for the rabbinate here in New York, and her intent always has been to serve small, out-of-the-way Jewish communities, which she has now done in such unlikely places as India.

Rabbi Barbara Aiello has now settled down in a village called Serrastretta, a village outside Nicastro, itself a part of a “Five-Town” area called Lamezia Terme, which is in the province of Cosenza in the Italian region of Calabria. Just think Deep South. She lives in the house where her father was raised – he’s the one who went to Pittsburgh -- and she has established a new synagogue, Ner Tamid del Sud, tkjtkt of the South. It is the first active synagogue in Calabria since the Inquisition destroyed Jewish life in southern Italy, where Jews lived productive and harmonious lives for centuries, living alongside both Muslims and Catholics. In Nicastro/Serrastretta, as well as at other Jewish sites in Italy, Rabbi Barbara conducts weddings and bar mitzvahs – yes, Americans come to Italy for these tktkts -- among her many other activities.

Rabbi Barbara is now going to be in Sarasota, Florida, where she has organized an Italian Roots Conference on February 25 and 26. It’s free, and Jews, Italians, Jewish Italians, and everyone else is invited. If you are in or near Sarasota, it’s worth stopping by if only to meet the charismatic rabbi.

Although Italian Jews and Jews who think they may have Italian roots are, of course, most welcome to attend, and will certainly learn something, the conference is also geared to help Christian Italian-Americans find their roots in Italy, perhaps Jewish roots. Among the speakers at the conference, Kim Sheintal, president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Southwest Florida, will explain how one can trace their Jewish roots in the south of Italy. According to Rabbi Barbara, who gets this figure from knowledgeable historians, before the Inquisition, as many as half of Calabrians and Sicilians were of Jewish heritage. It’s funny. Just weeks ago, a very well-educated Catholic Roman friend made the outlandish claim that “most traditional Roman dishes were originally Jewish.” That’s patently untrue. But, still, yet, that a smart and cultured person has that impression means there’s something to it. The Jews in Italy before 1492 did, indeed, leave a traceable and important influence on the southern Italian kitchen.

Go to Rabbi Barbara Aiello’s website, for more information and to register for the conference – and to see her other activities.

BACK ON THE AIR
I have returned to radio in a very small way. Every Monday morning, at about 7:40, I will be a guest on the Marshall and Mike program on Robin Hood Radio (WHDD), Sharon, Connecticut (1020AM, 91.9 FM), my old stomping grounds in the northwest corner of the state, where I lived for 17 years.

The station recently became an NPR affiliate, and can be heard loud and clear in Litchfield County, Connecticut, in northern Duchess County and Colombia County, New York, as well as over the border in the nearby southern Berkshires of Massachusetts.

If you are not an area resident, the program is archived on Robin Hood Radio’s website. Click on “On Demand,” then click on “Arthur Schwartz.” You can listen to an archived segment any time you like. Just picture me sitting at the little table by my kitchen window in Brooklyn, having my coffee with Marshall and Mike (and you) on Monday morning, chatting about what I’ve been eating, cooking, and thinking about it all. I am trying to give a recipe every week, too.

PET RESTAURANT PEEVE OF THE SEASON
This is definitely a sign of age, and every time I get peeved about this I have to laugh at the echo, the irony, of my father’s voice in my head: “Hang up the coat, young man.” He said it a sing-song way. It became his chant when I walked in the house.

Now that I finally understand the need to hang up my good coat, whether at home or wherever, I find that Manhattan real estate is so costly there sometimes is no place to hang it in a restaurant. Why give up valuable table space for a coat closet, even a coat rack. These days, I can’t bear to have it bunched up on my chair with me sitting on part of it. Even in a hamburger joint or pizzeria I feel the least they can do is provide a hook on the wall. But no. Instead, when I ask for a place to put my coat, they look at me like I am some kind of lunatic. Or really old fogey. It’s another reason to eat home.