Memories from Being a Jew Abroad

By Abe Fried-Tanzer
KOC Editor
New York University

It’s been over a year now since I spent a semester abroad in Italy, and it’s now the time when a number of my friends are returning from their various experiences overseas. Talking with a friend about her Passover experiences in Australia and contemplating what to write about for this article has caused me to go back and evaluate my Jewish experiences in Europe. A year has passed, and while I can still reference the blog I kept while in Italy, certain memories stand out more than others.

What sticks out is the way that Jewish people operate in a world that isn’t as welcoming or safe as it is in the United States. Those who are strictly Shomer Shabbat (Sabbath observant) attach their house or apartment keys to their belts to avoid carrying because there is no eruv (a demarcation which, by legal fiction, turns the public domain into a private domain, enabling one to carry on Shabbat). The concept of a hekhsher (kosher label) doesn’t exist in the same way in Europe, and rabbis and restaurants instead provide detailed lists of approved foods to purchase from the supermarkets. Most memorably, stopping to ask anyone on the street where to find a synagogue always elicited the same response: look for the police car.

As part of a project for an immigration course I was taking in Florence, I interviewed the synagogue rabbi, the Chabad rabbi and the owner of the kosher restaurant in Florence. All three are immigrants: Rabbi Levi was born in Israel to Italian parents, Rabbi Borenstein comes from Montreal, and Simcha Jelenik emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1981. Each brings with him a sense of the world elsewhere and how things work in other places. Rabbi Levi delivers his Friday night sermons in English. Rabbi Borenstein upholds the strictest standards of Kashrut. Simcha struggles to find his own place in the Italian community and run the only kosher restaurant in Florence.

It’s the attitude that the two Rabbis express which is particularly interesting. Rabbi Levi was born in Israel and has been to the United States. He is aware of how people can uphold laws and standards in those places, and also how things work differently in Italy. He described the Jewish people in Florence to me as an assimilated Orthodox community, still adhering to traditional principles but operating within a secular society. Many Florentine Jews don’t make it to services on Friday evening because they work too late and only have time to cook dinner once they make it home. The Saturday morning crowd is considerably larger. Jews in Florence, a city without a Jewish ghetto like both Rome and Venice have, integrate their Judaism into their daily lives and still manage to stay religious.

The situation in Venice is different. During my three-day visit, I saw numerous Jews wearing kippot out on the street, something I didn’t witness anywhere else during my time abroad. Most of those people were students at a Chabad yeshiva there, bringing their sense of Judaism to a foreign land. GamGam, a kosher restaurant in Venice, is taken over by Chabad on Shabbat and serves over a hundred people free meals. They seat all the young males along the water and preface dinner with twenty minutes of exuberant dancing on the street. Unlike the Italian-born residents of Florence, these Jews aren’t trying to conform to society, but rather, to bring what they know best and celebrate it in a new place. Venice also has a synagogue with an Italian rabbi and a definitively native community. To me, the most important takeaway is that it is truly fantastic that so many Jews who travel abroad can have both options and still experience their Judaism.

[Posted 6/11/10]