Shavei Israel’s new emissary to Italian Bnei Anousim shares the story of his own journey to Judaism and Israel
Rabbi Pinchas Punturello
When Rabbi Pinchas (Pierpaolo) Punturello’s grandfather died in Naples, Italy, his father’s Catholic family covered all the mirrors in the house where visitors came to pay their respects. Rabbi Punturello was very young at the time and didn’t pay much attention. But that act – a specifically Jewish mourning custom – was the first subtle clue that there might be hidden Jewish roots in the family.
Years later, though, Rabbi Punturello began to find Jewish evidence everywhere. As he researched his father’s side more, he found that his father’s mother’s family name, “Mussumechi,” goes back more than 500 years, to the time of the Inquisition in southern Italy, where it is listed as Jewish in Inquisition record books. The name, in fact, derives from the Hebrew mish-mish for “apricot.”
In addition, much of the family had left Italy and was now living in New York where Rabbi Punturello discovered that about 25 percent of them were married to Jews. When he asked his cousins who lived there why that might be the case, they could only point to vague overlaps in the importance of “family” to the Italian and Jewish peoples. But Rabbi Punturello knew there must be more.
And so began a remarkable journey for a young man who would eventually wind up formally converting to Judaism, moving to Jerusalem to study to become a rabbi and now returning to southern Italy to serve as the rabbi and emissary to other Bnei Anousim – Jews whose ancestors were forcibly converted to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries and whom historians refer to by the derogatory term Marranos – in the land of his birth.
Ultimately, it was not his father’s side that gave him the final push in his Jewish awakening. Rabbi Punturello’s mother also had Jewish roots – and they weren’t all that hidden; his mother knew her background but rarely spoke about it openly at home. But when Rabbi Punturello visited the Jewish cemetery in Naples as a teenager, he was shocked to discover it was full of tombstones bearing the name “Russo” – as his mother was known before she married.
Now convinced of his heritage, Rabbi Punturello formally returned to Judaism when he was 18. He studied with Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, President of the Assembly of Italian Rabbis and head of the rabbinical court of northern Italy. He also received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and political science in a joint program between the universities “L’Orientale” of Naples and Paris. He was subsequently appointed to serve as the “rabbi” of Naples. But he hadn’t actually received smicha – “rabbinic ordination.”
“There is a tradition in Italy,” Rabbi Punturello explains, “that smicha is divided into two parts: the maskil (or educator) and the chacham (literally, the ‘learned one’).” One can serve as a maskil – a first level “rabbi” – in Italy while still studying towards become a chacham, which is what he did. From 2004-2010, he was the “chief rabbi” of Naples, a city with 250 Jews. “It’s the last ‘official’ Jewish community in southern Italy,” he adds. “ So all the Jews in Sicily belong to this community.”
The time had come to progress towards the second part of his rabbinical title, so Rabbi Laras sent Rabbi Punturello, then 35, married and with 4 young children, to Jerusalem to study at the prestigious “Beit Midrash Sephardi” yeshiva in the Old City and then Yeshivat HaMivtar under the auspices of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, one of the leading voices of the Modern Orthodox world. Rabbi Laras also put the young Punturello in touch with Shavei Israel’s educational director, Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum, who also runs a program to train rabbis for service abroad. It was a perfect fit. Two years later, Rabbi Punturello had full “international” smicha.
But during those two years in Israel, something changed. After spending nearly his whole life in Italy, committed to the Jewish communities there, Rabbi Punturello discovered that he’d fallen in love with Israel. He wanted to make his home in the Holy Land.
As is so often the case, discovering and following one’s passion can often lead to unexpected opportunities. Shavei Israel and the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), the official umbrella organization of Italian Jewry, were keen to put the energetic and likeable Punturello to work and a position was created that fit the young rabbi like a custom-crocheted kippa (head covering or yarmulke).
According to the plan, he would continue living in Israel, where his children were now going to school and on their way to becoming full Israelis, while traveling to Italy ten days to two weeks out of the month to work with the Bnei Anousim – the very community Rabbi Punturello came from and knew well. He is the first rabbi ever appointed to work specifically with the Bnei Anousim of southern Italy and Sicily.
During his two weeks in Israel, he also teaches Judaism in a new program for Italian-speaking Bnei Anousim created at Shavei Israel’s Machon Miriam Conversion and Return Institute in Jerusalem, and delivers online lessons via Shavei Israel’s partnership with WebYeshiva (see our story here [link]).
The job began in March and Rabbi Punturello has now been back to Italy several times. He has some ambitious plans. Paramount on his list is to organize a Shabbaton – a weekend seminar for the Bnei Anousim in southern Italy – twice a month. These Shabbatonim will move around to the small communities where the Bnei Anousim live, often in quite isolated locales with exotic sounding names: Puglia, Palermo, Campania, Calabria.
The variety of Bnei Anousim Rabbi Punturello has already met is inspiring. “There are people who have families; bachelors looking to start families; people who started studying 5 and 10 years ago; people who know nothing,” he explains. “The idea is to be a part of every single family who lives there, from whatever cultural or Jewish point of view they are coming from.”
The mainstream Italian Jewish community hasn’t always been welcoming of the Bnei Anousim; indeed, they’ve often viewed them with suspicion. That’s why the most recent Shabbaton Rabbi Punturello participated in was so remarkable – it was a seminar for the entire Italian Jewish community, organized by the UCEI, and attended by some 400 people. But this year, for the first time ever, the Bnei Anousim were invited to join in, too. We have more information about the seminar, along with pictures, here [link].
How many Bnei Anousim are there in southern Italy and Sicily today? Rabbi Punturello says it’s too early to tell. “I get emails everyday from someone new,” he says. In Calabria, there are about 100 people who have already started the conversion process. Another 6o Bnei Anousim are studying in Palermo. Shavei Israel’s Rabbi Birnbaum adds that “for sure we are speaking about thousands of people.” You can read our previous reporting on the Bnei Anousim of southern Italy here [link].
Southern Italy owes much of its Jewish history to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, when many of that fleeing community sought refuge in the region. Prominent Jews included Don Isaac Abarbanel, the great Torah scholar and Biblical commentator, who also served as finance minister to Spanish King Ferdinand, along with his family. But when the Spanish monarchs captured the region in 1510, a series of further persecutions began in Italy, which included forced conversions and expulsions.
The Inquisition was active in the area for centuries and burned Marranos and conversos until 1700 and possibly later. But the Bnei Anousim of the area clung to their Jewish identity, handing it down from one generation to the next and, today, their descendants are beginning to return.
Rabbi Punturello has a two-pronged agenda for the communities with whom he’s charged with working. “On the one hand, I’m going to teach them, to work with them on their Jewish identity,” he explains. “But on the other hand, I want to help them build self-sustaining communities. I don’t want to be the only teacher or the only chazan (cantor) there. The aim is to have independent Jewish communities all over the south of Italy.”
Social media will, of course, play a part. Shavei Israel has started a new website, newsletter and Facebook page in Italian which Rabbi Punturello is managing. “The number of likes to our Facebook page jumped by 50 percent in just two days after we announced it,” he says. As we noted earlier, Rabbi Punturello is also teaching classes “virtually” via the WebYeshiva platform. Some of the younger Bnei Anousim have expressed interest in making aliyah to Israel, so Rabbi Punturello will be supporting this initiative as well.
He’ll have some help. In its role as the sponsoring organization, the UCEI plans to send rabbis from Rome to teach and lead prayers during some of the Shabbatonim. “But I’m the rabbi responsible for the whole project for Shavei Israel” Rabbi Punturello says. His wide background, including his non-Jewish academic studies, many languages (he speaks Italian, Hebrew, English, French and Spanish), and occasional work as a journalist in the Italian press, makes him particularly approachable.
“Coming home after 500 years is not easy, but it’s wonderful,” he says with pride. He’ll have his work cut out for him. But it’s a job he was literally born to fulfill.