The shuls from the now-defunct communities of southern Italy have seen several fates. Either they’ve been transformed into museums, the furnishings have been transferred to Israel or to other shuls within Italy, or they are in their original condition but rarely used. We originally came to Italy’s Piedmont region to perform brissim, but our visit wound up being an adventure in rediscovering the exquisite, abandoned shuls of the last centuries — left intact to tell the stories of their past.
We were summoned to Piedmont’s regional capital of Turin (Torino) to perform a series of brissim by our host Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum the chief rabbi of Turin and Piedmont. He sits on the Israeli Rabbinate’s beis din for giyur runs a program (Straus-Amiel / Ohr Torah Stone) for placement and education of rabbis around the world and has a passion for the confluence of halachah history and Jewish life. His travels around the globe are legendary and we have been with him in interesting Jewish communities on many occasions.
He asked us to come to Italy in order to perform brissim for three adults and an infant. We arrived after midnight on a Thursday and by 8 a.m. the next morning we were on our way to an old Italian villa at the top of a hill overlooking the Alps to perform a bris on a baby whose parents can trace their Jewish roots back over 500 years.
Next we prepared to do brissim on the adults. One was a prospective ger but he was a no-show. The other two were much simpler halachically yet quite emotional. They were both Jews who had until then been areilim (uncircumcised) one of them being the son of a Holocaust survivor a 60-something-year-old Jewish widower who had been baptized as a youth during the war years and who felt a passion to have a bris before he died.
The bris of an adult is a serious matter that requires local anesthesia surgical instruments stitches bandages and a sterile environment. We sterilized all of the equipment and proceeded to do the brissim in the course of two hours. One of the people talked about how meaningful it was for him to have his bris at age 30. He felt a need to be part of the Jewish Nation. His lack of a bris until now was a sad testament to the absence of active Yiddishkeit in the Italy of the postwar decades since this man’s grandfather had been a beloved gabbai and shochet only two generations earlier.
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