Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Ghetto Chic
Friday, January 26, 2007

A few years ago I spent a week in Rome writing about the Jewish community for a GOURMET special issue on the City. I learned how to cook Jewish artichokes, went to a festival at the thriving Jewish community center, attended a wedding. Naturally I spent a few days walking around the ghetto, just steps from the river, where Jews were locked in every night for centuries and prevented from taking a stroll along the water with their lovers, their children, their grandparents. Many were forced to attend church.

Few Jews were living there then, and the neighborhood wasn't all that chic. It was a history lesson, one that most Jews of the City wanted to keep alive, but certainly didn't need to wallow in. Along comes the NYT today for some reason expressing sadness that the Jews of Rome don't want to live in the place where their great-parents or higher were forced to live. It's exactly the kind of false piety that can be annoying in journalism about the Jews, but it does give an update on the area for anyone who dreams about visiting, or hasn't been in a while:

High real estate prices, not violence or bias, are driving the last Jews from their homes in the old ghetto, which is slowly transforming itself into a trendy enclave for the rich and famous. Experts say only 200 or 300 Jews remain, in a neighborhood that numbered perhaps 9,000 after the deportation of 2,000 or more during World War II.
But there is a second paradox. Even as the number of Jews living in the ghetto drops to near nothing, Jewish life is thriving.
Rome’s Jewish school recently moved to the ghetto from a neighboring area. Jewish shops, including the first kosher fast-food restaurants, are popular. Visits to the museum at the grand synagogue have doubled in two years.
“Even if Jews no longer live in the area, they come to open their shops,” said Daniela Di Castro, director of the Jewish Museum of Rome. “So there is always Jewish life around, to work, to go to the synagogue, to buy from the kosher market, bring their children to school."

Labels: Judaism, Travel

Posted by B Feiler at 8:40 AM
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