Itongadol.- Italy\’s conservative Jewish community accuses progressive Jews of being too Catholic-friendly.
These are troubled times for Italy’s tiny, millennia-old Jewish community. Currently, there are about 35,000 Jews registered in the Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane (UCEI), the national umbrella organization of the local communities. Most of the Jews are concentrated in the country’s two major cities: Rome, which alone counts for about 40 percent of UCEI members, and Milan, with 20 percent.
Although it is possible that the number of Jews in the country, whose presence dates back to the 2nd century B.C.E., is higher, and there are other Jewish organizations in addition to the union, such as those operating in the framework of the Chabad-Lubavitch and Reform movements – UCEI is the only Jewish entity formally recognized by the government, and by far the most representative.
At present, there’s a tough political struggle going on within the national organization, where, among others, the subject of the relationship with Catholic institutions is being heatedly debated. In short, some of the more conservative members are accusing the more liberal side of being too “cozy” with the Church, although some progressives maintain that such charges are a pretext for a power struggle.
Specifically, last month seven members of the governing council of the UCEI, all of them from Rome and belonging to the conservative faction, resigned in what appears to be a rift with the union\’s centrist president, Renzo Gattegna, also from Rome. Among the council members who resigned are the charismatic president of that city\’s Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici, and Elvira Di Cave – a physician who, on a popular Jewish online forum, described her resignation as a reaction to excessive coverage by UCEI’s newspaper Pagine Ebraiche of Catholic news: “I’ve been reading with outrage the work of Pagine Ebraiche chief editor Guido Vitale … because of the attention he dedicates, at our expenses, to the Osservatore Romano [the Vatican\’s official newspaper],” Di Cave wrote.
At about the same time, Shalom, the official magazine of Rome’s Jewish community, which has traditionally been supportive of the conservative faction, published an editorial accusing Gattegna, the UCEI president, of “not being passionate [enough] in his defense of Israel,” and of wasting money promoting a communications strategy perceived as being too close to the Vatican. Like Di Cave, Shalom\’s editor, Giacomo Kahn, who signed the article, was also upset by what he sees as Pagine Ebraiche’s frequent quoting of the Catholic press.