Newsgroup: it.cultura.ebraica
Titolo: dicono di noi

interessante articolo della Jewish Telegraph Agency a proposito di 
Italia, Reform, Ortodossi...
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2010/06/10/2739565/question-in-italy-how-do-we-reach-non-orthodox-jews#When:18:11:01Z
Question in Italy: How do we reach non-Orthodox Jews?
By Ruth Ellen Gruber · June 10, 2010
ROME (JTA) -- The years-long battle that ended recently with the 
dismissal of the chief rabbi of Turin, Italy, highlights a 21st-century 
identity crisis afflicting the oldest Jewish community in the Diaspora.
Rabbi Alberto Somekh, who like all recognized rabbis in Italy is 
Orthodox, had served as chief rabbi in Turin since 1992. But critics 
said he had antagonized a sizable segment of the city's largely 
non-observant 900-member Jewish community with a confrontational 
personal style.
His ouster last month marked the first-ever dismissal of a chief rabbi 
in an Italian Jewish community.
It focused attention on the challenges facing Italian Jews, ranging from 
intermarriage, falling birth rates and budget woes to factionalism, 
political infighting, and sharp divisions over religious practice and 
Orthodoxy.
In particular, some have become disaffected by what they say is a lack 
of pluralism and increased Orthodox rigidity in the official community, 
alienating many.
"Italian Jewry was always nominally Orthodox but it accepted everybody, 
observant or not, under one umbrella," Daniele Nahum, 27, the recently 
elected vice president of the Milan Jewish community, told JTA. "Now, 
however, the rabbis here have been adopting a more conservative 
mentality, and this has pushed some people toward Reform or Chabad."
The Jewish presence in Italy dates back to ancient Roman times. 
Approximately 30,000 Jews now live in the country, but only about 25,000 
are formally affiliated with Italy's official Jewish communities in 
cities such as Turin, Milan and Rome -- and the number dwindles from 
year to year. Most Jews live in Rome, with about 12,000 affiliated, and 
Milan, with about 6,000 affiliated.
Italy has no national chief rabbi, but the post of chief rabbi exists as 
a tenured position in some of the 21 communities linked under the 
umbrella of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, or UCEI. The UCEI 
leadership serves as the official political representative of Italian Jewry.
About three years ago, when the community's lay leadership initiated 
attempts to oust Somekh from the Turin post, Turin Jewish community 
president Tullio Levi accused Somekh of "attitudes of ill-concealed or 
even open contempt" for less observant members of the community, as well 
as a "serious lack of sensitivity and consideration" for their problems.
Community leaders formally ordered Somekh's dismissal in early 2009, but 
rabbi appealed -- his appeal was rejected last month. While Rome Chief 
Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni said the decision had nothing to do with 
Somekh’s Orthodoxy or alleged rigidity, Somekh had become a symbol of 
the lack of openness to non-Orthodox Jewish practice.
Somekh himself declined to comment about the issue, but told JTA he 
"feels good" and is moving on.
Orthodoxy historically has been the only recognized Jewish stream in 
Italy, and the Somekh incident illustrates tensions between the official 
Orthodox establishment and parts of the broader Jewish population.
"The leadership of the Italian Jewish community is very concerned that 
it continues to be recognized by the Israeli rabbinical establishment as 
being Orthodox," said Lisa Palmieri Billig, the American Jewish 
Committee's representative in Rome. "But the fact is that a very large 
section of Italian Jews behave as Reform or Liberal Jews would in other 
countries, or are totally secular. At the moment, a feeling of belonging 
to an emotionally cohesive, culturally unified 'ethnic' group is lacking."
One especially painful controversy in a country where the rate of 
intermarriage is high stemmed from rabbinical decisions over the past 
few years that have barred or sharply limited the conversion of young 
children of non-Jewish mothers in mixed marriages.
"In Venice 30 years or so ago, it was sufficient to say to the community 
that you wanted your child to be Jewish," Anna Vera Sullam, a Venice 
Jewish community leader, told JTA. "Now it's much stricter. Child 
conversion doesn't exist anymore."
Others see the problem differently. More than 250 people, for example, 
joined a Facebook group set up to support Somekh after his dismissal was 
made final.
"It's clear that a great part of the community has lost the intellectual 
tools to comprehend the role of a rabbi according to Jewish tradition," 
one member, Paolo Schiunnach, wrote on Facebook.
"Rabbis are not just salaried functionaries, with merely pastoral and 
preaching roles," he wrote. "The rabbi is a scholar who has received 
smicha and is authorized to decide on community needs and general and 
particular halachah," or Jewish law.
Dario Calimani, a member of the UCEI council, said inconsistency and 
lack of communication in the Italian Rabbinate itself is part of the 
problem.
"In Italy there is no national mark for kashrut, there is no unified 
policy on conversion, there is no halachic coordination in general or 
synergy in the cultural field, there is no agreed policy regarding 
relations with the Catholic Church," Calimani wrote in a recent edition 
of the Turin Jewish magazine Ha Keillah.
"In a community as small as that in Italy, coordinated solutions should 
be sought," he said. "Instead, we see kashrut treated as a purely 
commercial question, and conversions that provoke communal crises or are 
resolved outside the rules."
Rabbis themselves recognize many of these problems.
"Kashrut is an issue," said Rabbi Elia Richetti, the chief rabbi of 
Venice and newly elected president of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly. 
"And we need training for kosher butchers and mohelim. We also need 
closer contacts among the rabbis around the country." In this regard, he 
added, "I think it would be helpful to create a website for the 
Rabbinical Assembly."
Italy's Jewish establishment also appears to lack a strategy on how to 
deal with the small new Reform congregations that have cropped up over 
the past few years in Milan and a few other cities. Though not 
recognized or funded by the UCEI, several of them offer increasingly 
broad services, including conversion, and they reach out to intermarried 
Jews and others who feel alienated by official communal institutions.
Chabad, meanwhile, has been a well-established presence in Italy for 
more than 50 years and is very active in Rome, Milan, Venice and other 
cities. But it, too, operates outside the official Jewish establishment.
In an attempt to tackle at least some key problems, the UCEI has 
mandated an overhaul of the official statute that governs organized 
Jewish communal life. A special UCEI commission was charged with the 
job, and in recent months its work has generated considerable debate in 
the community. Much of the statute reform targets organizational issues, 
but also under discussion are relations between rabbis and their 
communities, including possible term limits for chief rabbis.
Jewish central institutions must "open themselves to an external society 
that is ever more complex, globalized and multi-ethnic," UCEI president 
Renzo Gattegna said in an official report in 2008.
They must also, he said, "abandon those old prejudices, those old 
parochialisms and those misunderstandings between larger and smaller 
communities that have ended up diminishing the potential of Italian Jews."
"There's an enormous demographic crisis" in Italian Jewry, Guido Vitale, 
the editor of the Jewish monthly Pagine Ebraiche, told JTA. But in the 
end, he said, "it's values that count, not numbers."
---
Per il manifesto, le FAQ ed un'interfaccia Web visita 
http://www.e-brei.net/

 end, he said, "it's values that count, not numbers."
insomma...
non si può imporre alla società di tenere un comportamento che non è
di questi tempi, per condizioni contingenti.
l'unica sarebbe rinchiudersi in dei ghetti chiusi come gli Amish, ma
ancora una volta i numeri non sono sufficienti. né come numero di
persone, né come kmq a disposizione sul territorio e nelle città
italiane.
poi...ma perché storicamente deve passare come unico modello il
modello di 70 anni fa, prima del nazismo? idealizzato poi....
 70 anni sono passati ormai...
sarebbe come continuare a pensare che 1euro=1000 lire, senza
considerare che il cambio euro-lira è del 2002, e sono passati 8 anni,
con un'inflazione normale...non si possono veramente piu' confrontare
i prezzi in lire (di quasi 10 anni fa) con i prezzi in euro (attuali)
-giovanni
