Fourth Chabad Center Opens on the Island of Corsica

A storefront on the main road in Calvi, on Corsica’s northwest coast, is now home to the island’s fourth Chabad center. Walk out of the town’s train station and it’s directly across the street — wide windows, no shutters, visible from the sidewalk. For a town of fewer than 6,000 permanent residents, it’s a conspicuous addition. For the Jews who’ve been coming to this Mediterranean resort town for decades, it’s the one thing that was missing.

Michel Madie was nine years old when his family arrived in Calvi in 1967 from Algeria. His parents — his father a descendant of Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition, his mother a Berber Jew from the Algeria-Morocco border — had lost everything in the expulsion of 1962. They were on vacation when they were told not to go back. They never retrieved a single possession.

In Calvi, the family were some of the only Jews in town. Madie grew up with no synagogue, no community, no visible Jewish life at all. He left at 18 and has lived in Manhattan for the past two decades. His mother still lives in Calvi.

He was back for the inauguration. “I wouldn’t even consider such a thing as a possibility when I was a kid,” he said. “Entering the Chabad center — being seen from the street, from the main road of Calvi — it was incredibly emotional.”

Rabbi Levi and Mushky Pinson, who’ve directed Chabad of Corsica from the capital city of Ajaccio since 2016, opened the Calvi location this summer with an inauguration that drew some 50 people. The center joins existing operations in Ajaccio, Bastia, and Porto Vecchio, giving Chabad a presence in each of the island’s four main regions.

Jewish history on the island runs deep. Some historians trace the first Jewish presence to Roman times, after the destruction of the Second Temple. Jews from Egypt settled in southern Corsica around the ninth century, and Sephardic Jews and Marranos fleeing the Inquisition arrived in later waves. In the eighteenth century, Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican independence leader, granted Jews equal rights — ahead of most of Europe. During the First World War, several hundred Jews from Tiberias were resettled to the island by the Ottoman Empire after refusing to renounce their French citizenship, building the Beth Meir synagogue in the port city of Bastia. And during the Second World War, Corsican authorities refused to cooperate with Vichy, saving thousands of Jewish refugees. Over three-quarters of the island’s Jewish population survived.

Today, the permanent Jewish community is small — a few hundred people scattered across the island. But Corsica draws thousands of Jewish tourists each summer, mainly from mainland France, and Calvi’s Balagne region has become a popular destination for Jewish weddings. Rabbi Pinson estimates some several dozen Jews live in the Balagne year-round, though he expects to discover more.

The center offers a synagogue, kosher food on-site and for delivery, a small grocery corner, and a snack bar. A group of rabbinical students is running it for the summer. All kosher food is ordered from Paris and shipped through Marseille — the same route that supplies most of the island, where 90 percent of food arrives by cargo ship. Some of it reaches Calvi aboard the train that winds along the coast, dropped off steps from the Chabad house door.

For Madie, who grew up in that town as one of its only Jews, the location is the point. The Chabad house sits next to the post office, next to the bank, on a street no one in Calvi can avoid. Years ago, his parents held Shabbat dinner behind closed doors in a town where no one really knew they were Jewish. Sixty years later, the light from the Chabad house spills onto the main road of Calvi, and no one is closing the curtains.