Our extended family in Rome

Yesterday was one of those days that reminded me that sometimes the best moments in life are the ones you didn’t plan. 

We’d spent the day walking around the Vatican. By the end of it we were exhausted. Our feet hurt, we were starving, and like most families on holiday, the only thing we could all agree on was that we needed to eat. 

Somehow, almost by accident, we found ourselves in Rome’s Jewish Ghetto. We didn’t really know much about it. We wandered past a few kosher restaurants, Jewish bakeries, and little shops before settling down for dinner. Most of the shops and places were closed because it just happened to be Friday night. Shabbat. 

As we sat there waiting for our food, groups of Jewish families started walking past us on their way to synagogue, greeting one another with smiles and “Shabbat Shalom”. And something happened that I didn’t expect. 

We felt … at home. 

It’s a strange feeling to explain, but I think every Jewish person knows it. You’re thousands of kilometres from home, surrounded by people you’ve never met before, speaking a language you don’t understand, and yet somehow they still feel like family. They may have different accents. The conversations may be in Italian instead of English. But somehow you know you belong. 

We could hear the Friday night service coming from the Great Synagogue across the road. The melodies drifting through the streets were the same melodies we sing every Friday night back home in Johannesburg. Seven thousand kilometres apart, yet exactly the same. 

It was beautiful. 

When we got back to the hotel later that night, I started reading about the history of the Jewish Ghetto. That’s when everything changed. I realised that the very streets we’d been walking through and eating dinner in were the same streets where, in October 1943, the Nazis rounded up hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children before deporting them to Auschwitz. Most of them never came home. 

I looked at the photos I’d taken only a few hours earlier. The restaurants. The synagogue. The families. The individual people. And I got goosebumps. 

Without knowing it, Kerryn, Zac, Cruz, and I had shared our Shabbat meal in a place where an entire Jewish community had once almost been erased. 

Yet there we were. Eating our Shabbat dinner. Watching Jewish families walk freely to synagogue. Listening to prayers filling the streets once again. 

It suddenly struck me that this wasn’t just a nice neighbourhood with a fascinating history. It was living proof that Hitler didn’t win. 

Not because the buildings survived, but because the people did! The faith did! The traditions did! The songs did! 

The same songs that were sung there generations ago are still being sung today. Shabbat candles are still being lit. Families are still proudly roaming the streets and gathering around tables on Friday nights. 

That is resilience. That is hope. That is what it means to belong to something bigger than yourself. 

Whether ending up there was pure coincidence or something a little greater, I’ll probably never know. But I do know this. Sometimes history isn’t found in museums. Sometimes it finds you while you’re simply looking for somewhere to have dinner. And sometimes the places you never intended to visit end up teaching you lessons you’ll remember for the rest of your life. 

• Adam Thal is a multi-award-winning South African filmmaker and executive producer, who is known for bringing powerful human stories to global audiences.