Elio Toaff

Elio Toaff (30 April 1915 – 19 April 2015) was the Chief Rabbi of Rome from 1951 to 2002. He served as a rabbi in Venice from 1947, and in 1951 became the Chief Rabbi of Rome.

He was born in Livorno. the son of the city's rabbi Alfredo Sabato Toaff and his wife Alice Yarch. one of four children, the others being Cesare, Renzo and Pia, He then undertook, under his father's guidance, his early religious formation at Livorno's Rabbinical College, while attending the University of Pisa where he studied law. He had difficulties finding a supervisor for his final thesis. By that time, the Fascist government had passed its antisemitic Italian Racial Laws, which blocked Jews from registering to study for, though not from completing, a tertiary degree. Only one professor, Lorenzo Mossa, finally offered to step in, and assigned him to work on the legal conflict between Ottoman, Jewish and English law in Mandatory Palestine. He managed to graduate by 1938, despite the fact that the head of the commission, Cesarini Sforza, before whom he was to discuss his thesis, abandoned the proceedings in disgust at the presence of a Jew, In 1939 he completed his theological degree. His brother Renzo, a surgeon, was literally ordered out of the hospital where he was employed while conducting an operation, but refused to do so until he had completed it. Despite his father's reservations, given the dangers of the time and the idea one rabbi sufficed for the family, he was ordained rabbi the following year. Shortly afterwards he was appointed chief rabbi of the community of Ancona, a position he maintained until 1943. In one of his first acts, on his arrival, he managed to persuade a local Jewish family not to convert to Christianity: he argued that such a move was 'cowardly, useless and undignified' in the circumstances.

On one occasion, when he was driven out of the Ancona hospital while tendering religious consolation to a Jewish patient, he sought out the local head of the carabinieri who immediately provided him with an escort of four gendarmes that enabled him to return to the patient's bedside. The marshall in question assured Toaff that he could call on him for help if any other problems arose.

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