Donato Manduzio, a disabled veteran of World War I, transformed himself into a messianic figure after returning to San Nicandro, his remote ancestral village in southern Italy.
As he resumed his trade as a cobbler, he turned to faith healing, and after reading the Old Testament for the first time, he discovered the Hebrew scriptures.
With all these thoughts swirling in his mind, Manduzio formed a movement grounded in the idea that the Jews were the chosen people.
Incredibly enough, he believed that he and his followers were the sole remaining Jews in the world. Only later would he learn that his supposition was false. In the meantime, he instructed his flock to observe Jewish rituals and keep kosher.
Rabbis in Rome wrote him off as a religious crank, a holy subversive, but he and his acolytes carried on. During the tail end of World War II, members of the British army`s Jewish Brigade arrived in San Nicandro, stunned by the presence of these self-styled Jews, who had been left alone by Italy`s pro-German fascist regime.
Still considered rogue Catholics by Italian rabbinical authorities, Manduzio and his followers, about 80 people, converted to Judaism in 1946. Three years later, virtually all the converts made aliya. Manduzio died in 1948, and like Moses, never saw the Holy Land.
Their amazing story is recounted in a film, The Mystery of San Nicandro, inspired by a book by John Davis. Scheduled to be screened during Holocaust Education Week at the Columbus Center (901 Lawrence Ave. West) on Sunday, Nov. 3 at 4 p.m., Vanessa Dylyn`s 67-minute documentary is fascinaing and riveting.
San Nicandro lies at the heart of her film, but broadly speaking, it’s also about the renaissance of Judaism in southern Italy, a region purged of Jews during the Inquisition.
Among others, we`re introduced to Barbara Aiello, an American-born rabbi who has returned to her father`s town in Calabria, Serrastretta; Incoronata Giuliani, a native of San Nicandro who remarries her husband in a Jewish ceremony in nearby Ancona; Laura Cattari, a woman of Italian descent from Hamilton, Ontario, who`s convinced her Sicilian ancestors were Jewish, and Eli Disalvia, an Israeli army officer whose parents emigrated from San Nicandro in 1949.
As the film unfolds, Cattari visits the ruins of a mikvah in Sicily, meets Rabbi Aiello and learns that some Sicilian surnames, such as Acardi and Adamo, are of Jewish origin.
The Mystery of San Nicandro reaches its denouement as it focuses on the Israeli descendants of the Italian converts, who now live in the Galilee, and on the San Nicandro`s contemporary Jewish community of some 40 inhabitants.
Dylyn doesn’t spend enough time exploring the difficulties the converts experienced in the newly established state of Israel. Nor are sufficient numbers of them interviewed to give a viewer a better picture of their lives in Israel.
But based on its own merits, this is a movie well worth watching.