Salomone "Moni" Ovadia (born 16 April 1946 in Plovdiv) is a Bulgarian-born Italian actor, musician, singer and theatrical author. He is one of the most highly regarded figures in contemporary Italian culture. His theatrical performances recall the lost world of eastern Jewish culture, its Yiddishkeyt core, with its profound "burden of pain, wisdom and folly". as it was before the devastations of the Holocaust cancelled it, and murdered almost half of the world's speakers of Yiddish.
Ovadia was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1946 to a Sephardi Jewish family, His father, a violinist, had Greek-Turkish roots, while the family of his mother, a singer, was of Serbian origin. In March 1943, the 1,500 Jews of Plovdiv, including Ovadia's family, were saved from the Holocaust by the actions of Metropolitan of Plovdiv, Kiril, one of the heads of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church who threatened to throw himself before the train were it to depart with the community's Jews, whom the Nazis planned to deport to a concentration camp.[a] His family's sense of Judaism was restricted to observing key feastdays. They shifted to Italy in 1949 to flee a rise in anti-Semitism in post-war Bulgaria, which had otherwise protected its Jews.
Ovadia speaks Italian with a Milanese accent. In Milan, he attended its Jewish school. There he was taught to sing Yiddish songs, but only began to learn the language much later, from a Chabad Lubavitch rabbi, after an acquaintance, Rudi Litwak, insisted that, instead of frequenting Milan's Central Synagogue, with its Italian rites, they visit a small synagogue, Beit Shlomo, at Porta Romana, an apartment used as a shul or shtibi where the language was being spoken passionately by elderly Holocaust survivors and that rabbi.[b]

Return to Moni Ovadia Autograph Profile